Author: Theastoundingoutpost

 

‘Where Immortality Becomes Reality’ the holographic cube spelled as it danced in front of Mary’s eyes. She shifted in her seat and tried to read the pamphlet she took from the table in the waiting room. It covered the basics of the procedure, but lacked any reassurance for her anxious mind.

Johnathan noticed and blinked off his social media outlet, Wal. “It’s going to be okay.”  

She smiled, creasing every wrinkle on her face. Johnathan returned the same smile, as he grabbed on to her sweat-coated hand. Her head fell into its usual resting place on his shoulder.

A nurse walked through double doors on the other side of the room. Her gaze was blank as her Itacts fed her information directly into her eyes. “Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins.”

Johnathan raised his hand. “Doctor Hader will see you now.” The nurse smiled in a way that was as much a part of the advertising as the cube was.

Both Johnathan and Mary stood up with their hands still clasped together. They followed the young nurse down the hallway. Her eyes continued to glow as she typed various messages on her Itacts. At the end of the hallway she opened the door and nodded to them before she turned and left without saying a word.

On the right side was a large bookshelf. Various neutral-colored books filled the wall. They reminded Johnathan of the way his students used to bring pristine books to class while swearing they read them. Pictures of children and vast cities lined the other wall. Mary recognized those as the pictures that came with the frames. The far wall was a large window peering out into the vast city outside. Dark towers were illuminated by thousands of stars contained within them. Buildings outlined by the tangerine glow of the setting sun.

In the center of the large room was a white desk with two matching chairs in front. At the desk sat a young man in a black uniform, scrolling through his Wal messages on his Itacts. When they sat down he blinked off his glowing display.

“So, you folks are here to secure your new life, right?” Doctor Hader said, as he leaned forward on his desk.

“Yes,” Johnathan nodded.

“Well, I’m not so sure,” Mary began, cutting off Johnathan. “Can I ask a few questions?”

The doctor’s eyes flashed green, indicating he got a message on the Wal. His grin faded. “Of course.”

“I have read a lot about this, Transcendence you are calling it, but I still don’t understand exactly how the transfer works.”

“Well, I won’t bore you with the technical details.  What happens is we plug you into our computers which will replicate your mental processes into your new electroplastic brain. Then we will provide you with a new body to house it.”

“I know,” Mary stated. Johnathan could tell she was fighting off annoyance by tone of her voice.

“Honey,” Johnathan interrupted with a polite smile.

“Now,” Mary continued ignoring her husband, “I’ve followed the news stories about the banning of cloning human tissue because of the Genetics War in China.” Johnathan stiffened and dropped the smile on his face. “How does the lack of natural human parts affect people?”

“We replicate the human body with as close to perfection as humanly possible. We use a Silicon mesh with leather exterior. It forms calluses and transmits sensory detail exactly like human tissue.”

“How does that substitute real human tissue?”

“It is the best we can do under the law of the Nora Agreement. Until the Neorepublicans repeal that law we have to make synthetic human bodies for the Transcendent population. But surveys have said that 89% of people have been fine with the new skin type. 34% of people even prefer it.”

“People today,” Mary whispered under her breath.

“I’m sorry?” Hader said. His eyes had flashed indicating a notification.

“Nothing,” Johnathan said, preventing his wife from speaking.  

“So, are we in agreement to proceed?” Hader asked in the most chipper tone he has had since they had come into the office.

Mary frowned. “Can I think about it?”

“Of course, honey,” Johnathan said. He stood up.

“Are you sure? This is a great opportunity! Immortality has finally been achieved. Why would you deny this? This is the closest we have ever gotten to achieving Godhood!”

“Maybe we aren’t ready to be Gods,” Mary said walking out of the office with Johnathan.

They walked to their Transit a gray, oval, pod. It drifted off the balcony of the hundred and thirtieth story. They sat down in the pale interior at a small table with two chairs facing each other. There were large oval windows on both sides and enough space to move around the cabin.  

“Car, Home please,” Johnathan commanded.

“Of course sir,” the car’s friendly female voice responded. The vehicle lifted away from the balcony and drifted into traffic.

Johnathan looked at his wife and reached out for her hand. She withdrew and narrowed her eyes.

“I don’t want to do this.” Mary stated.

“Why not? Our life could continue, forever.” he cleared his throat. “Together.”

“But it won’t be us.”

“Why do you think that? Of course it will be us.”

“Trapped. Stuck in some unnatural body.” Her face twists in repulsion. “Humans were meant to die, it is the natural order of things.”

“But you don’t understand, you have never seen someone die!  I have! I watched men, my men, die in the Genetics War. I watched the light leave their eyes. I saw the hollowness that was left. I know my days are numbered after all the gene splicing they did…” He paused, his throat throbbed on his vocal cords.

Mary’s eyes had darted away from him but she did interject anything.

Johnathan choked back the pain. “I talked to men who died and came back. There isn’t anything else after this and I am scared of the void, the emptiness consuming everything I was. I don’t sleep anymore. It’s all I think about!” Anger seeped into his indigo eyes. He stood up and walked over to the window. The city was a blur of black and amber as their Transit darted past miles of city in seconds.

Mary could see the pain he carried but hated being talked down to like this. “So the answer is to give up what made us human become a Syn?”

“A Syn?” Johnathan snapped, “Now you are starting to sound like that zealot Father Marius. Preaching about the natural order and that we should die so that we can meet God or worse. That we are cowards because we refuse to accept our sins and go to hell like decent monsters used to. Well I did dark things in the war, alright? I killed children. I killed defenseless men and women. I watched people fighting for their families. For their basic human rights, be defiled and murdered. After that I thought life was pointless.” He paused letting the anger go before he concluded with, “But you gave me purpose.”

Mary’s gaze snapped back to him, her glare grew sharp. “And you think my purpose is to exist for you despite my beliefs? As if the only thing I do is live so that your world works. Well maybe our love won’t last forever.”

“We have arrived at our destination sir,” the Transit said as it opened the door to their apartment balcony.

Mary walked out onto the balcony in silence and began tending to her garden. She snipped tomatoes, looked at the pineapple bush for a ripe one, found two and put them in a basket. She carried them inside to cut them.

Johnathan stood on the balcony to let his heart rate slow down. He surveyed her garden. The balcony had become a tropical forest. Pineapple bushes, tomato plants, any fruit that didn’t grow on trees had a place somewhere in his wife’s oasis. She had grown a fully organic garden in this sterile environment. Creating an island of nature in a desert of concrete and metal. He took one last breath and walked inside.

In the kitchen, Mary was at the counter trying to reach the top cabinet. “Always had trouble with that cabinet,” he muttered to himself. He reached up and grabbed the wash rag from the top shelf and said, “I’m sorry honey.”

“Go through with it,” she said. “You don’t have much time left I understand that. It must be difficult. But I can’t do it. It’s not natural.”

He touched her arm and she spun around and embraced him. He felt her warm tears on his shirt as he returned the hug. She looked up at his face, a whole half foot above hers and stood up on her toes and gave him a gentle kiss. “I love you and don’t want to stand in the way of you doing what you want, just as you can’t stand in the way of what I want.”

“But I’m happiest when I’m with you. Please come with me, we can continue our life together.”

Her lips recoiled with hesitation. “Listen, you are the love of my life. But that life needs to end.”

“But, what about our love?” Johnathan asked.

“That will be up to you.”

#

Johnathan and Mary arrived at the hospital a week later for the operation. Doctor Hader briefed them before the procedure, “Once your consciousness is fully integrated we will wake you up and you will be a new man. Have you given any thought to what you want your new face to look like? If you would like to return to a point in your life, we just need a picture to base the face off of. Otherwise you can design it now or let it be random.”

“Why would someone pick random?” Mary asked.

“Some people like the idea of getting a fresh start and mimic the birthing process as much as possible. Don’t worry, the face retains the basic structure it just might not turn out… attractive. Or if you’d prefer, there is a catalog of facial parts for you to choose from if you’d like to look through it. We have over 250 ears, 300 mouths and a startling 400 noses.” A holographic catalog appeared in the room between them and displayed various body parts.

“Also,” Hader continued, “if you’d like to alter the purple eye thing I understand. Some ignorant people will already have prejudices against you when you become a Transcendent. Perhaps, it would be better to not be an augmented that those Liberals are always protesting.” Johnathan frowned.

“That’s alright, I have a picture for you,” Johnathan said. He activated his Itact. An image of his face from forty years ago when he was thirty-eight appeared in the room.

The doctor’s eyes widen and said, “Can I ask why then? When most people want to return to an age they normally want their twenties.”

“It was the last time I found a new life,” he said turning and smiled at Mary. She returned the gesture.

“Okay, well I copied the image and they will begin constructing the face. I will leave you two alone while you prepare. Whenever you are ready just go through these doors,” Doctor Hader said. He got up and left through the sliding double doors behind him into a dark surgical room.

Johnathan turned to his wife. Tears were flowing down her face as she stared at him. He stood up and helped her to embrace him as she broke down into sobs. They held each other for a long moment. She lifted her head up and crushed her lips against his with more force than his lips had felt in years. He returned the force for a few seconds and then pulled away; parting with his lips for the final time. He said, “You are the love of my whole life.”

“And you are the love of my life too,” she said, letting him out of her arms. She watched in silence as he walked around the desk and disappeared into the dark room.

Two hours later Mary stood up when Doctor Hader came through the big white doors from the inner hospital. Behind him followed the exact same man she fell in love with the first time she had ever laid eyes on him. Everything was there, the dark hair, the strong jaw line, the stout nose, even the tender indigo eyes. But his smile was the same as it was hours before. Loving and full of joy but it was off-putting without the wrinkles that used to crease his cheeks.

Her eyes filled with tears as she rushed into his embrace. He returned in a strength she hadn’t felt in years but something was off. The skin was of a leather texture and if felt strange to her. She looked up to him, then to the doctor with a frown.

Doctor Hader said. “You grow used to it as time goes on. Most people…”

Mary stopped listening as he trailed off to talk about studies about this effect.

Johnathan said, “It’ll be okay sweetheart,” and leaned down to kiss her with his soft, strong lips.

#####

Later that night, when they were climbing into bed together Johnathan began to kiss Mary’s wrinkled neck. Mary froze for a second letting the soft tingle of heat and moisture fill her neck. It had been some time. “We should make sure everything in this new body works,” he said as he moved closer.

Mary rolled into him pushing her body against his which felt like falling onto a leather couch that had baked in the sun too long. She pulled away after a few seconds and pushed him so fast he almost fell off the bed.

“What?”

“I can’t. It-it, just feels too weird. You look young enough to be our son and you feel more like the car seats than like you.” Her eyes had shrunk as if she had just rolled into a stranger.

“It is okay honey. I understand it will be an adjustment. That is fine. We can wait,” Johnathan said with very little emotion as he climbed back onto his side of the bed and turned the light off. “You will get used to it, soon.”

“I hope so.” Her voice still held the edge of anxiety.  

Mary didn’t sleep that night. She tossed and turned, like the wind on a rainy night. Every time she brushed up against his artificial skin she was reminded of his new deformity. She tried sleeping far away from him but she could still see his face in the pale moonlight. The face she had only seen in pictures for years. The face she married but had long since faded. The face of a familiar stranger sharing her bed. Finally, she got up and went to sleep on the couch. Not the leather one but the soft polyester one where there were no reminders of him.

In the morning Johnathan noticed her absence and found her on the couch, asleep. As he approached, her head stirred and she looked up at him.

Her eyes flashed with confusion and fear for a moment before she recognized him. She sighed at the thought and sat up and spoke in a tired whisper, “I’m sorry. I thought I could handle this but I can’t. Not yet. I’m going to continue to sleep on this couch for the time being until I can get used to your… new body.”

“That is fine, sweetie,” Johnathan said with a smile.

After weeks past were every brush sent a look of disgust. Where every other time he would walk into a room it would take her a heart beat to reconfigure he he was. Weeks of long silences and sharp looks.

One day when Johnathan handed her a coffee cup in the morning her fingers brushed his. She gasped and let the cup drop to the ground, shattering on the tile of the kitchen. Johnathan did move to clean it up, instead he asked in neutral tone, “Are you ever going to be able to touch me?”

“Honestly,” Mary said letting the irritation mount in her voice, “no. I hate your body. It feels wrong, it feels more like furniture than skin. The heat it gives off is uneven, your arms are freezing at night and you look too young. You like our wedding photo and I can’t stand it. Here I am, old and decrepit and there you sit with your youth, and your fake body.”

“Well, you would not be so old if you had done the procedure,” Johnathan said an edge cutting into his even tone.

“And what? Become an armchair? Feel forty years older than I look? Live with the contradiction of age with youth? And what to walk down the street and have people look at me like a robot. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed the way people look at you!”

“I think you are jealous that women are looking at me now,” Johnathan the tone of his voice continued to rise but stopped short of a yell. His face shifted from anger to regret the instance he said it.

“Well, if you want to be with those women maybe you should leave me. I’m too old for you. I’m too slow and unattractive. You deserve, better don’t you?” Mary asked with a glare harder than the steel alloy that made up Johnathan’s new bones.

Johnathan’s voice a tint of desperation in it. “That is not what I meant.”

“No. It’s exactly what you have been thinking. I see it in your eyes. You are becoming like every other Syn aren’t you? Abandoning your old life and commitments. Taking up a life of partying because what consequences do you have to live with? You have a perfect metabolism and eternal youth!”

“You have been watching that Father Marius, again.”

“I follow him on the Wal. Yes.” Her chin pointed up towards him.

“Maybe you are right. I should not live in a house with one of the ‘Flock,’” Johnathan sneered at the phrase.

“Oh, now I am in the ‘Flock’ because I subscribe to his Wal?”

“You believe his racist propaganda. It’s turning you against me.”

“I have to be on your side all the time? Beside who are you to call me a bigot? You hate the Chinese more than any-”

Johnathan slammed his fist down on the wooden kitchen table so hard that ended with a crack. A tense silence engulfed the room. When he spoke his voice sounded like dull thunder but felt more subdued that it had in the past, “You were the only person in the world who understood what I went through there. The hell that I went through. The things they did to their own people. The New Yin Revs committed horrible atrocities and it had to stop!”

“They were simply trying to get rights for the working class. The cloning was immoral, and then they were being worked to death—”

“Forty years of marriage,” Johnathan glowered, “You never disagreed with me that the New Yins were evil. You never once questioned or brought up what happened there? Why now? Is it Father Marius? Do you trust him more than your own husband?”

“I have changed my opinion.” Her hands were shaking as she spoke, but her voice stayed consistent. “It happens from time to time.”

“The minute you start questioning what happened during the Genetics War is the minute you lose whatever shred of love I have clung to.”

“I already lost that,” Mary said.

“Then I’m leaving,” Johnathan said standing up. He walked into the bedroom to pack his things.

Mary sat there in the empty kitchen and stared at shattered coffee cup watching the steam rise and disappear fade into the air.

The next week Johnathan called Mary on his Itact. His voice  stayed static but there was light in his eyes when the image of her appeared in front of his eyes. She looked tired and sick but smiled anyway. “I’m sorry,” Johnathan said. “We both said some things that shouldn’t have…”

“Where did you go?” Mary asked, “I looked up on the account and it says you charged to a cheap motel in Slicervile. Are you alright? Sy… Transcendents like you get snatched down there all the time for parts and I have been worried—”

 

“Don’t worry, it is temporary. I am getting an apartment in the Midtown tomorrow.” Johnathan licked his lips and said, “Unless you want me to come back…”

“I do,” Mary began before having the smile on her face fade. “But you can’t, not yet. I love you but I’m not ready yet.”

“When will you be ready?” Johnathan asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know, but I will visit you, and try to ease into it. Okay?”

#####

In the interim months they saw each other on a biweekly basis. Johnathan’s smile stretched all the way across his face but slowly faded every time she wouldn’t ask him to return to their home.

To Mary, the anxiety of seeing his youth again plagued her before every visit. Every time she saw him her disgust grew deeper, as he stood there, unchanged and unnatural.

One day, months later, while Johnathan was sitting in his small room watching something sent to him by a friend. The video was a show about a man trying to move past the weight of the war by falling in love with a younger woman. His Itact lens flashed with a call. The image flashed to life in front of his eyes as he saw a young woman. She had the face of youth but the expression that only comes with age. Most likely fellow Transcendent.

“Excuse me, sir, I have unfortunate news. Your wife had an accident.”

“What?” Johnathan sprung to his feet.

“It seems she was trying to reach something high in the kitchen when she slipped and impaled herself on a knife she was carrying. She is far too fragile to operate on and has lost too much blood to save. If you-” Johnathan had rushed out of the door  and ignored everything else the woman said.

He barreled into his Transit and commanded it to speed to the hospital. It obeyed and within twenty heart pounding minutes he had arrived at the nearby hospital.

Johnathan wandered the halls of the same place he had ascended several months earlier. As he made his way to the front counter the robotic receptionist looked up. It had a smiling face molded into it that seemed incapable of change. It looked at Johnathan and said, “How may I help?” Its voice was electric yet warm.

“I need to see Mary Wilkins. I am her husband Johnathan Wilkins.”

“Of course,” it replied. There was a brief pause from the automaton. Once it had processed the request it snapped its head toward Johnathan. “I am afraid I cannot let you do that, Mr. Wilkins. She is currently in critical condition. But according to the doctors notes she will most likely not survive.”

Johnathan slammed his fist down on the counter in front of the machine that thundered with a crack. The machine said something in return but Johnathan couldn’t hear it. He was too focused on his fist and his strength. Something he couldn’t have done before his procedure. After a second of contemplation his head snapped up toward the robot. “As her next of kin I demand to see the doctor residing over her.”

The machine nodded and summoned the doctor at once. After a few minutes an older Asian woman walked through the door. Johnathan felt a quick jolt of anxiety as his body simulated his skipping a heartbeat.

She smiled as she walked up to him, “How can I help you Mr. Wilkins?”

“How can you save my wife?” Johnathan pleaded.

“I am very sorry, sir. We can’t. ”

“Her injuries are too severe for us to operate on her,” the doctor continued.

“What if we performed the Transcendence operation? Could that save her?” Johnathan’s voice was shaking.

“Only if she had given consent before we begin—“

“That is enough doctor,” a cool, familiar voice cut her off from behind Johnathan. Standing behind him was Doctor Hader in his black Eternium uniform. “I will take it from here,” he said with a smile.

Johnathan turned to see what the Asian Doctor had to say. She glared at both Johnathan and Doctor Hader before storming off.

“Ignore her.” Doctor Hader placed a hand on Johnathan’s shoulder. “Now tell me what is wrong with your wife…”

Johnathan explained what had happened. Doctor Hader listened very carefully. At the end explained a legal loophole that allowed Johnathan to use his marital statues to substitute for her consent.

“The document I have laid out before you also states that this is something she would give consent for if she was able. Also, that neither of you will perform any legal action against Eternium.”

Johnathan knew her. He knew she would never want to become a Transcendent. But she did love him, he knew that and when push came to shove they would always do what they needed to do for each other. But who needed more help now?

Johnathan looked past Hader into the night sky, praying for an answer. In that moment, he thought that the lights of the city out shined the lights of the stars above them. He looked down at the lengthy legal document on the tablet screen and silently picked up the stylus.

#####

Johnathan sat in the waiting room in the same chair Mary had sat in when he came out a new man all those months ago.  Tears filled his eyes with worry. His mind couldn’t even begin to access his Itacts for any form of entertainment.

After several hours of waiting, she walked through the door. The same woman he had fallen in love with all those years ago. She was tall, much taller than Doctor Hader who had accompanied her. Her hair was long and black that framed bright green eyes that always matched the way she used to look at the world. But her eyes weren’t as warm as he remembered them, they seemed cold and distant. He went to hug her but she did nothing in return. Johnathan looked at her, then back at Hader.

He shrugged and said, “The operation was a complete success. She was talking a minute ago.”

Johnathan returned to face her with a puzzled look on his face. This time fury was filling her eyes. Johnathan took a slight step back and looked at Hader.

“You are free to go whenever you want. We will message the bill later…” he trailed off before leaving the tense silence of the room.

Johnathan didn’t say anything. He led her through the halls of the hospital to the Transit and told it to take them home. They both sat in the floating room as the dying lights of the city gave way to only the darkness of the night.

As they approached their home Johnathan spoke first, “Look I understand that you are angry with me–“

“Angry?” Mary said, cutting him off. “Angry that you turned me into this abomination of nature? Yes, I am very angry. Why would you do this to me?”

“Because I love you! Because I wanted to save you!” Johnathan yelled, anger and pain choking his voice.

“I did not want you to save me, and you never did love me,” her voice grew quiet and sharp. “If you did, you would have understood that this is not something that I would have wanted. It makes me less human, less than who I am.”

Johnathan’s mind tossed about for a few seconds, as he tried to determine whether anger or pain was correct. His fist tightened on the table, “What are you going to do? Leave after I saved your life?”

Mary’s eyes widened but before she could say anything the Transit stopped at their apartment. The door slid open as Mary stood up and walked out of the Transit.

Johnathan followed her out onto the balcony amid her garden. Most of her fruit had been harvested as the seasons shifted away from the warm life giving summer. The hanging greens looked withered and dead in the pale, artificial, light of the balcony.

Mary turned to face him. He couldn’t help but think how beautiful she was despite the anger on her face.

His focus on her beauty faded as the words came out, “I’m leaving you.” Her tone flat and emotionless.

“But,” he stammered out, “you are the love of my life. Both can continue now.”

“Did you really think our love would last forever just because we did?”

“Yes,” Johnathan whispered.

“Everything deserves to die at some point.”

She shook her head and stepped into the darkness of the apartment.

Johnathan turned around as the first light of a new day started to peek out through the gray buildings of the city. He stood amid the dead plants and watched sun rise alone.

 

END.

By: Andrew J. Gleason

Andrew Gleason currently lives in Chicago with his girlfriend teaching children with Autism. He went to Ohio University and came out of it with a Psychology Degree and a minor in English to satisfy his real passion for telling stories.  

 

 

Klaxons drown out the screams.  I smell smoke and the dust from shattered concrete.  I’m standing just inside Johnson’s lab, surrounded by stainless steel fermenters and rows of refrigerators, in front of shelves of shattered glass vials and test tubes trembling in their racks.  At the end of a counter I see the desktop monitor that Johnson must have used and I lunge toward it.  There’s another rumble and the lights flicker.

It’s a computer that got me here.  Four months ago, a machine intelligence on a Defense Intelligence Agency server registered my intrusion.  It reached out through the web and followed my encrypted trail back through a series of rerouted networks, past a proxy server and onto my firewalled laptop.

I thought I had escaped detection.  I spent a fair portion of the last afternoon of my normal life trying to convince my girlfriend that I had not just blamed her for my hack of the Department of Defense.  “I was only saying that I wouldn’t have figured out the connection on my own,” I explained in my best reasonable-sounding voice.

“If I had thought that would make you start breaking federal laws I probably would have kept my ideas to myself.”

“I had to see what they were hiding.”

Jenna had been doing research on computer architecture for the past six months, and for reasons that apparently had not involved wanting me to break computer abuse statutes she had traced a handful of patents to a pair of shadowy government contractors and started to speculate about their use.  What if the Defense Intelligence Agency’s hypothetical surveillance-directed artificial intelligence, publicly disavowed by Administration officials, wasn’t just hypothetical?  What if it already existed?  She was only interested in computers peripherally.  Because she was dating a software engineer, she wanted to explore the potential of biocomputing.  But once she’d asked her questions, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them.

“These are people who can put you on trial without even letting your lawyers know what the charges are,” she said.

“I know what I’m doing.  They’re not going to find me.”  By the time I said that, though, her comments were already beginning to sow doubt.  One of Jenna’s defining attributes is— was— that she was almost always right.  Whatever the critical issue was, and no matter how deeply buried it was beneath compelling distractions, she usually homed in on it instantly.  It’s what made her such a brilliant biochemist.  Unfortunately, that was not always a skill in high demand among people whose sense of worth or career advancement depended on self-delusion, obfuscation or generally sloppy thinking, which seemed to be the main reason why her department chair and academic colleagues never let her rise above the position of adjunct professor.

“If you get a trial,” she said.  “If they don’t just lock you up immediately.”

“Jenna, you were right about the AI.  But that’s only the beginning.  I saw digital copies of signed construction contracts for something called the Impregnable Stronghold.  It’s a massive underground fortress to house government leaders.  They’re preparing for nuclear war.”

Jenna looked up.  Three black SUVs with tinted windows glided up the driveway and stopped in front of the split level.  The armored doors of the closest vehicle opened and two men in black suits emerged from the 12-cylinder Ford hybrid.  One scanned the street and yard while the other walked back to the middle vehicle and opened one of the rear doors.  A large man with a graying buzz-cut and a fashionably tight-fitting charcoal suit climbed out and strode up to Jenna’s front door.

“I guess they found me after all,” I said.

The guy with the buzz-cut asked to see me.  When I stepped past Jenna he introduced himself as Colonel Henrick Forsman.  “Would you care to take a walk, Mr. Young?”

I wondered what would happen if I refused, but not quite enough to test it, particularly since it seemed like a good idea to find out what Colonel Forsman was there to say.  I also had the irrational thought that getting some physical distance from Jenna would help to insulate her from my felony.  We stepped out into the half acre field of ryegrass behind the house.  The development was a few years old, and there were no fences between the houses’ back yards, just a long open space bordered on the far side by oak and maple trees.

“How did you find me here?” I asked.

Forsman ignored the question.  His body language seemed remarkably relaxed for someone who might be about to take me away in handcuffs.  But his pale blue eyes were studying me, appraising.  “How did you break in?”

I wasn’t going to make things worse by lying.  “The random number generator you use for encryption isn’t actually random.”

“Keep talking.”  Forsman stopped walking, and I stopped beside him.  We were midway between the woods and the house.

“One of your contractors posted a reference to the encryption key system on an internal message that was copied in a document that was very briefly posted online.”

Forsman nodded.  “I’d like to offer you a deal.  A chance to help your country.  Hell, maybe the whole human race, if you care about that kind of thing.”

“I have a choice?”

“You can go to prison.  If we have a country left when this is all over, you might even get out someday.  But you already made your choice, didn’t you?  You hacked into one of our servers.”

“I didn’t know—”

“You passed a test.  We were looking for someone with your skills, and you let yourself be found.”

“The server was a honeypot?  Is that how you normally find hackers?”

He looked at me.  “No.  But you’ve seen our files.  You know how desperate our leaders are.”

If they had been waiting for someone to hack their server, they also could have planted false documents.  But I had already found enough external data to mostly corroborate what I’d seen.  I believed him.  Maybe not everything, but I had no doubt the desperation he had mentioned was genuine.  “What are you asking me to do?”

He started walking again, his back to the house.  “You’ll have 24 hours to pack and say your goodbyes.   You can’t tell anyone where you’re going, even your friend back there.”

I hadn’t decided what I was going to do yet.  But obviously either way I was going to tell her.

The next morning I crossed the same field with Jenna, before the sun was fully up, when mist clung to the trees and colors had not yet emerged from the gloom.  The grass was wet with dew and the bottoms of our pants were damp.

“If you go you’ll never come back,” Jenna said.

“I can help, or I can risk going to prison and possibly not get out anyway.”  I turned to her.  “I have to do this.  War is coming.  The plans for the Impregnable Stronghold mean that the Coalition’s chances are better than the government is letting on.”

“Where do they want you to go?”

“They’re flying me to Baumholder in Germany.  I’m not supposed to tell you that.  That’s why I took you out here.  I don’t know if they have ways of listening at your house.”

“How long?”

“You said you didn’t expect me to come back.”

“But what did they say?”

“As long as it takes.  Until the Coalition is no longer a threat.  Hopefully not more than a year.”  I looked at her, trying to meet her eyes, but she was looking at the tree line.  “I love you.  But your whole life is still ahead of you.  I don’t expect you to wait.”

“Can I still talk to you?  Will you have Skype?”

She had on the chunky aquamarine earrings we had gotten on the road trip to Rehoboth Beach and even though her eyes were thoughtful, because they were always thoughtful, because she was always looking just beyond anything I could see, I could hear a new, strained note in her voice.  I absorbed all of it— the emerging uncertainty between us, the grass crunching as we shifted our feet, the cool morning air, the smell of buttonwood and azalea—and I knew that all of these perceptions, my whole subjective world, would sooner or later end, and no one would ever have these thoughts or memories again.  No one would know how much I wanted not to leave her.  “Everything has to be by email.  My messages to you will be monitored.  The colonel didn’t say it, but if they wanted to they could rewrite our messages and we wouldn’t even know.  The AI you correctly guessed they have can mine the web to learn how we think and mimic our communication styles.”

“Then until you come back we won’t know if we’re really hearing from each other.”

“I’ve thought of a code we can use.  Not even a code, a pattern.  As long as you see it, you’ll know the message came from me.”

The car came to pick me up that evening.  We were only ten minutes away from Jenna’s house when I knew something was wrong.  “We missed the turnoff,” I said.

“We’re not going to the airport.”

“You said—”

Forsman grinned, and I saw that the casual air that had struck me earlier was due to the fact that he would say or do anything to get what he needed and not spend a moment thinking about it afterward.  “We have a base here in Maryland.”

I realized then how difficult the next twelve months would be.  It would have been one thing to think about Jenna continuing with her life without me, and to mislead my friends and my parents about where I really was, if I were across an ocean.  It was something else entirely when I was less than an hour’s drive away.

The driver took us through hills forested with ash and maple and off the main road, up a single-lane strip of asphalt, past two razor wire-topped fences and into spreading fields of wheat and corn and hay.  We passed a few outbuildings and approached a modest farmhouse that stood in the shadow of a solid-looking barn and a grain elevator.  I didn’t see any apparent defenses.  “Where’s the base?” I asked.

Forsman just grinned again.  The barn doors slid open and we drove down a concrete ramp into a vast underground garage.

I’ve been underground ever since.  There are—were—close to fifty of us.  Engineers, programmers, scientists, soldiers, Defense bureaucrats, janitors, cooks.  The facility they’ve built down here can hold at least three times that many, but that doesn’t make it feel any less claustrophobic.  The main halls have full spectrum lighting that brightens and dims in tune with the daylight above, which I guess is supposed to make us forget that we can’t see the sun.

I share an office with half a dozen fellow coders.  I’m quartered with three other men, two techies and a bioengineer from Minneapolis named Keith Johnson who has a lab down the hall from my office where he tries to coax prokaryotes into producing propane and proteins and other useful resources.  But I have my own plans for his lab, and now that I’ve decrypted his lock and gotten past the security door I’ll find out whether I can get my idea to work before I’m shot in the back by one of the soldiers or the roof caves in on me.

“This is where we’re going to win the war,” Forsman told me the day he brought me here.

“The war that we’re not officially fighting.”

“The last president had to make the enemy think we were prepared, because we weren’t,” Forsman explained.  “That was the only way to establish credible deterrence.  But the new Administration reversed course because it was afraid that if the Coalition knew that we could withstand their nanospheres and pulse-nukes and biobombs they’d immediately start upgrading them.  As it turns out, they were already were being upgraded, and we weren’t as prepared as we thought we were, so our attempt at obfuscation accidentally turned out to reflect the truth.”

“What’s my role?”

“You’ll be working on the next-gen artificial intelligence.”

“I take it that’s supposed to help guard against the Consortium.”

“The AI you’ll help complete will build a real-time strategic map of the entire battlespace, with the ability to use contextual information to fill in gaps in real-time.”

“You think war is coming.”

“There have already been attacks.  All minor so far, meant to probe our defenses.”

“But you think we’ll win.”  This was an optimistic but not unreasonable assumption.  I couldn’t quite bring myself to frame it as a question.

For the first time I saw a serious look on his face.  “Our mission here is to win.  But there is a Plan B.  The Midnight Legion.”

“What’s that?”

The grin came back.  “If we do our jobs here, no one will ever find out.”

Despite his self-assurance, over the next few months my job constantly changed.  First the AI was to supplement the war effort, then it was to find out what the enemy was working on and when and where it planned to attack, then it was to serve a backup command and control function in case military leadership was decapitated, then it was to preserve human knowledge if our civilization collapsed.

When I received that last order I knew we were in trouble, because if civilization truly did collapse an AI would be useless.  There wouldn’t be anything left to power it.

One morning about sixteen weeks into my assignment I sat down in front of one of the computer terminals that had limited access to the Internet.  Being unable to move freely online felt almost as constricting as the physical isolation of our underground facility.  I had been told that our web restrictions were meant to prevent us from inadvertently exposing our base’s existence and location, but that didn’t make it any easier.

I started typing my daily message to Jenna.  My themes had evolved since the first few disorienting days.  Then, I had mostly discoursed about how much I missed her.  Now I skipped that and went straight to nonclassified details about my work and new life.  I didn’t want her to lose interest, or to feel guilt or ambivalence if she’d decided to start dating again, because either of those outcomes might mean that eventually she would no longer remain on the other end reading my emails.  So on that occasion I wrote about my bunkmate Johnson.

I focused on the personal because I didn’t think other details would get past the censors.  I had plenty of drama to mine.  Johnson took every opportunity he could to let me know that he didn’t trust hackers like me.  But I wrote to Jenna about him because apparently he did trust one of my programming colleagues, and from what he had told me about Johnson’s work I knew that Jenna would be interested in it professionally once I got out and had the chance to explain it to her.

Recently Johnson had begun looking at ways that his fuel-generating bacteria could eat some of the toxic chemicals our facility was producing.  Given enough time and refinement this might solve several problems, including how to make the AI viable after the grid went down.  My colleague had designed a visual programming language to let Johnson easily manipulate and recombine the bacteria’s DNA as easily as shifting around boxes on a screen.

I was almost finished when a new email arrived from Jenna’s address.  It was about accompanying her grandmother to her oncologist the day before.  Almost everything about the email was convincing.  The writing sounded like Jenna’s voice, and the narrator’s facts were impeccable.  I didn’t have Mrs. Reinherdt’s checkup schedule memorized, but this was about the right time for her next one, and it made sense for Jenna to mention it.  The doctor’s name, the street, the type of cancer, the treatment and remission history—all of it was accurate.  The only thing that was off was a reference to Mrs. Reinherdt’s offhand dismissal of one of Jenna’s recommendations.  That might have been plausible for many grandmothers and their grandchildren, but not for Mrs. Reinhardt and Jenna.  Mrs. Reinhardt didn’t dismiss Jenna’s ideas.  No one did.  When Jenna had an idea, you took it seriously.  It’s not that the exchange couldn’t have happened, but it would have warranted some additional context.

Up until then I had been worried about censors doctoring messages I wanted to get out.  It hadn’t occurred to me they would also be censoring messages coming in.  What would be the point?

I skipped my shift to read through all of the emails I’d received from Jenna since I’d arrived.  Now that I was looking I saw that she had been using the same simple pattern I’d applied to my own messages.  Her first email to me started with a sentence containing 133 characters and consisted of 133 sentences.  The next email was 420 and characters and the same number of sentences.  The characters and sentences had matched until about a week ago, when the pattern stopped abruptly and did not return.

The day after this discovery I saw Forsman talking to a group of senior base officials.  By that point he spent most of his time at other sites and I rarely ran into him, so I knew that if I wanted to speak with him this was my chance.  I hovered in the hall until he started to turn away and then strode up to him.  Two soldiers immediately turned and blocked my way.  “Are our incoming messages censored?” I called past them.

Forsman stopped and stared at me.  He no longer looked relaxed.  He was impatient and tired and irritated at the interruption.

“My girlfriend, Jenna Crenshaw.  There’s something she’s trying to tell me.  But it’s not getting to me.”

Forsman looked torn, but then an aide tapped him on the shoulder and impatience won out.  “She’s gone, Young.  Frederick was hit a week ago.  We’ve lost a dozen towns to suicide strikes since you came here.  I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.”

I felt a rushing in my ears.  “I don’t—how come—how—”

“Whoever you were doing this for before, you’re not doing it for them any longer.  You’re doing it for yourself, and maybe the United States if it survives as a country.  We’re saying publicly that we have the attacks under control, but the Coalition has demonstrated that it can get through our defenses, and there’s only so much longer we can deny that.”

The next day the walls and ceiling suddenly vibrated like the earth was trying to shake them off.  A deep rumble came from above.  I knew instantly and viscerally what was happening.  The farm was being bombed.  Even though it was midmorning I hadn’t yet gotten out of bed.  Sometime during the night we had lost external communications, and I could no longer reach the AI that I was supposed to be helping to program.

There was a half-minute of shouts and sirens, and then the walls shook again.  I imagined dying where I lay.  The base no longer mattered.  We were marooned underground with no knowledge of what remained above us.

It was my feeling of helplessness that spurred me to action.  The people I loved were gone, and the artificial intelligence into which I had poured so much energy was unlikely ever to come online.  I could no longer communicate with anyone I knew.  Even if I left a message, it might not be found for years or decades.

I thought that meant my existence here would simply vanish.  There was no sign I could leave that would survive this war.  And then I realized I was wrong.  We might not survive, but there was a way for our work here to remain.  I jumped up and ran toward Johnson’s lab.

Now I reach the monitor and my proximity turns it on.  For a panicked moment I expect to be waylaid by heavy encryption, maybe something biometric, but of course there’s nothing so sophisticated—with only fifty of us living in an enclosed space, if people are incapacitated others need to be able to access and carry on their work.  The only thing blocking me is a password, which takes me about ten minutes to crack.  Then I’m in.

The lights keep flickering, but the computer I’m using must be generating its own power.  It’s a visual interface designed for someone who doesn’t know programming.  I know programming, even though I know very little about biology.  I hear booted footsteps in the hall outside.  “Young!  Are you in there?  You’re not authorized to access this lab!”

The program is meant to let Johnson manipulate the bacteria’s genetic code, and that’s what I do.  My first step is to enable the bacteria to produce modified proteins that can communicate with each other and, theoretically, help the prokaryotes coordinate their activities.  The next step is more complicated, and I don’t know how well it will translate from computer programs based on brain architecture and emergent mind theories to living organisms: I adjust the way the bacteria respond to certain stimuli, primarily each other’s simple, repetitive actions.  I fine-tune my previous work, so that at as the modified bacteria start to interact they will provide a one-time signal to let me know if my interventions are working.  Then I set the bacteria on a course of accelerated replication.

There’s a huge roar from above, a boom that vibrates through my bones, and the ceiling collapses.  Someone is screaming in a nearby room, but I hear nothing from the hallway, and gradually the scream subsides into whimpers and then there’s only silence, a deep, absolute silence.  I feel pain so intense that all I can see are hallucinatory flashes in the darkness.  Gradually I become aware of a new sound, coming from me.  I am gasping.

At some point I realize I can see again, but I can’t move.  I am trapped in rubble.  Pain pulses in me, it pulls me open and lacerates me, it consumes me from within.  I can’t feel or see my legs.

The screen in front of me is cracked, but it still shows me a shattered image.  It’s the only source of light.  After a while I hear screaming again, whimpering cries, muffled and far away.  For the first time I am conscious of the weight of broken earth and stone above me, the depth of our tomb down here below.

I can imagine that this is the end of the base.  I don’t know if it’s also the end of the United States of America.  Perhaps it’s the end of the human species.

It’s my ending as well.  I know I am going to die and when I die this throbbing pain will mercifully end.  But through the pain a part of my mind is still racing, still observing.  Even if my plan works perfectly, it might take half a decade before the new biological network is self-aware.  Now all I can do is watch for the signal I programmed to tell me that it’s on the right track.

I wish I could see the sun again.  I wish I could see Jenna.  But I cannot move.  All I can do is watch the broken screen in front of me, watch the bacteria swim and divide, swim and divide.

And then a pattern forms, a spontaneous alignment of single-celled bodies.  The bacteria have formed a number: 133.

Here in the subterranean darkness a new consciousness is being born.

 

END.

By Aaron Emmel

Aaron’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.  He is also the author of a graphic novel, dozens of essays and articles, and the science fiction gamebook series Midnight Legion.  Find him online at www.aaronemmel.com.