The Singularity:

Heretic

by David Beers

Chapter One

Caesar first saw the living liquidated at twelve years old.

He knew it happened; by the age of twelve, everyone knew what liquidation meant. Most of the time, one never saw a liquidation occur. The act was kept behind closed doors, hidden from society because…well, for obvious reasons. Sometimes, however, the door was left open if a statement needed to be made.

Statements, though, were less prevalent now than in the beginning of The Singularity.

Humanity, for the most part, had learned what it needed.

Caesar’s parents didn’t know he went to watch the liquidation. They would never have allowed it. Once in a while The Genesis made a liquidation public, for educational purposes, of course. Children, especially, were encouraged to witness them, although The Genesis never mandated it. Parents could raise their children as they saw fit, and if The Genesis deemed a child unfit, then that child would meet its own liquidation.

The buzz created by the impending liquidation reverberated throughout the children at Caesar’s school. They termed these things ‘demonstrations’—had always termed them that as far as Caesar knew. A demonstration, like someone would show the crowd how to remove stains from a rug. And perhaps it was similar, the rug was society and the stain was whoever needed liquidation. They showed how The Genesis removed the stain.

“If you haven’t told your parents about it yet, make sure you do!” The teacher said. “We sent home letters last week, and Patrick is passing out one that you can take home tonight. You’re welcome to come alone, but it’s always best to have your parents join.”

These things needed to happen, Caesar understood that. Or, at least, he said he understood it. He wasn’t quite sure he did, though. Tonight the man being liquidated had committed adultery. Caesar understood why The Genesis didn’t want that happening. He understood that if left rampant, it could destroy the institution of marriage. He understood that adultery could lead to divorce, and divorce could lead to maladjusted children. He understood that maladjusted children grew up to create more problems of their own. The purpose of the liquidation tonight was to keep that cycle from beginning. The Genesis’ entire purpose, perhaps, could be summed up in that: to keep cycles from beginning. Unwanted cycles. Cycles that held the potential to destroy the human race. The liquidations made sure that didn’t happen. The man passing tonight could no longer contribute to the gene pool, thus lessening the chance of such behaviors occurring again. The public forum might also act as a deterrent for others considering the same actions.

“We want you to come so that you don’t make the same mistakes. Your parents either,” Caesar’s teacher told the class.

Caesar saw the reasoning behind it all and yet it didn’t feel exactly right. He wouldn’t say that aloud, not to his teacher, his parents, or his classmates. They all bought in, just as he knew he should. He didn’t know why he couldn’t buy in and he didn’t know what would happen if he questioned the process. If he questioned the morality behind it. He wouldn’t be liquidated, of course, but he might end up on a path he didn’t want to walk. You never knew what The Genesis contemplated. A question like that might not be noticed, or it might—and if so, any number of things could happen, and it was best they didn’t. So Caesar kept quiet. It was for the best, both his silence and the liquidation.

He went to the demonstration at five in the evening. His parents weren’t yet home from work and school had let out an hour and a half earlier. He rode the train, his eyes widening as he approached the stop, having never imagined this amount of people would show. He thought there might be a crowd, but not a festival. The train stopped and all the people he thought were headed home, exited at this stop. Caesar wandered amongst the crowd, following the moving trail of people, intuitively knowing they were bringing him to what he had come to see. Caesar looked at a group of five year old boys and girls being chaperoned in straight lines to the stage. Children of that age were never released, under almost any circumstances, but yet here they were, the same as him, ready to watch. He looked at them as if they were science experiments. He knew that six years ago he had been the same as them, but it had been four years since he moved in with his parents, and the life he lived before that felt like someone else lived it.

Food of all sorts was being sold and the smells made Caesar’s stomach turn. He knew what was occurring here, knew what he was about to watch, and couldn’t imagine eating anything before or after. Not for hours. Watching a liquidation meant you watched the end of someone, the end of a life, and yet people were here celebrating like this was a birth instead. Smiles and sodas, laughter and lemonade—it didn’t make sense to Caesar. He tried to block out the people around him, wanting to find the stage, to focus on what he had come to witness.

Why had he come?

He knew what it meant, knew—at least conceptually—what happened at these things. So what was the point of being here? He knew why his father didn’t want him to come. It’s not something children should see. We’ll raise you right and you won’t have any need of seeing something like that. Those things are for parents and children who don’t know how to act. Still, Caesar was here, ready to watch something that horrified him. Ready to watch someone die at The Genesis’s will.

The stage was twenty feet away but Caesar saw it perfectly. The man stood inside a glass tube. He was naked, and for some reason, his hands covered his crotch. Caesar found that odd: at the moment of his death, his crimes and life in front of a group of strangers so large that he probably couldn’t see the end of them, he was most concerned with covering his genitals. The man’s head had been shaved low, not bald, but close. Caesar could see him shivering, sweat dripping down his thin chest. The man might have weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, his frame looking frail inside the glass cage. Caesar didn’t like seeing him shiver, cupping his crotch—it made him feel guilty for watching. Like he could see the man’s thoughts, like he was peering into the man’s head and watching something he had no right to see.

He was shivering and sweating at the same time. Caesar had never seen that before. He scanned the crowd around him, but no one else seemed as concerned. Maybe this wasn’t their first time, maybe they had seen so many of these that the man standing in front of them held no more importance than a circus—just another spectacle to be seen. For Caesar, this was a person though, a human that was about to die, and more, the man knew it. The man committed adultery—Caesar had a vague notion of what that term meant, enough to know that he wouldn’t ask his mother about it—and now the man would die. In front of these people, his entire life would be cast away.

Caesar felt the air change. Kids at school told him it would happen, that the air would stiffen, turn tense, full somehow. It changed all at once, not slowly, but fast enough so that he couldn’t help but notice. One moment, the atmosphere was as it had been his entire life, and in the next, Caesar felt like he might have to swim to move ten feet to his right. The man in the tank felt it too. The crowd as well. Everyone hushed, all of the chitter-chatter ending as if a nuclear bomb exploded. All the eyes that were glancing around, looking at the hotdogs in their hands, or talking to the children playing around their feet—all of them now looked up to the stage. A metal thing, shining underneath the falling sun. There was no executioner, no one standing next to the man to press a button, or to pull a lever so that the floor would drop out below him, like Caesar had read they used years and years ago. The man was alone on the stage, and he had stopped shivering. He looked out at the crowd, seeing no one and yet his eyes falling on all of them, wide and frightened. His mouth opened slightly, a string of spit connecting his lips.

He started to melt.

Caesar had seen things melt before, ice cream, snow, wax. It took those things a long time to melt, so that one could barely notice if they stood and stared. They only saw that something had melted later, when they came back to look at it.

The man on the stage, though, didn’t need that amount of time. His skin simply started dripping; Caesar saw his chin first, the skin on it falling off like melting plastic. As it dripped down, it stretched, but eventually the individual strands of his flesh snapped, revealing raw meat beneath. The skin around his eyes stretched downward, showing the skull below, and then that started to melt as well. His fingers dripped to the floor, bone and skin and hair mixing together at the bottom of the tank. The man still stood though, his legs not completely dripping away yet, and he started screaming. The shrieks were delayed, like he hadn’t noticed his body turning into a soup beneath him, but when they came, they filled the entire space with pain that Caesar never thought existed. He screamed until his vocal chords melted, and then the noise fizzled out and was gone, the man standing there with his mouth open and the veins in his neck trying to burst open. Caesar couldn’t see his vocal chords melting, but imagined they simply dripped down his esophagus and into his stomach.

In the end, the man was a puddle on the stage. A red puddle without a single solid piece of him left.

Chapter Two

“It’s time.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. If we wait any longer, it’ll find him. It has to start now.”

“What if you’re wrong about him?”

“Then we’ll probably all be dead two weeks from now. It doesn’t matter. Get it started.”

Chapter Three

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

This doesn’t end well, but that’s no reason not to write.

If anything, what happens next gives me a stronger reason to write.

We’re not at the end yet, but we’re close. Or rather, he is close—Caesar. This was always about Caesar, not me, nor my wife, nor his family, nor anyone else. The story I’m putting down is Caesar’s and Caesar’s alone. I’m writing it because it won’t be told otherwise. The Genesis will never allow the truth out. It will spin this, tell its version so that in the end, Caesar is a hero and humanity saved. The thing is, I’m not sure The Genesis would be lying; The Genesis’ truth is still truth, even if a complete lie.

There is another truth though, and it starts at the beginning. It starts when The Singularity began and it plays out until now, until Caesar makes his choice. That’s the truth I’m going to tell here. My name is Leon Bastille and Caesar Wells is my best friend. He went further than any man before him, and I suppose that is something to be proud of. I can rejoice in that, although now, at this point, it feels hollow. It feels like winning a game against a team composed of blind people; regardless of what the score says, there is nothing to celebrate.

So this is Caesar’s story about how he tried to save humanity. I’m in this story, but my place has always been to follow Caesar. He was the greatest of us, all of us, and whoever thinks they shine brightly, they are only a candle in the sun when next to Caesar. Do we rejoice in that? That someone like Caesar came along? That we had a chance, that he gave us a chance to become more than what was planned? Or do we weep that the chance disappeared like sand in the wind? Maybe I’m writing this for me as well. Maybe this is how I cope with what should have been. If so, if The Genesis doesn’t find this and destroy it, then whoever finds it down the line will have to endure my tangents and feelings. I’m no historian. No detached observer that can write down the facts and ignore the emotions. Everything that comes next, I lived. Everything that you read is the truth as I saw it, the truth as a lot of us saw it.

We’re close to the end and I don’t know how to stop Caesar.

I want to tell you that up front, before you start on this journey.

It’s not going to end well, for anyone.

Chapter Four

Caesar opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

Fish swam all around him. He didn’t move, didn’t stir, just watched as a hammerhead shark propelled itself forward, inches from his nose. He would have loved to watch this all day. To see the ocean play out before him, to watch these creatures go on throughout their life without him ever having to get up from his bed. He looked on for another few minutes, watching a tiny fish swim in and out of a bed of coral, completely unaware of the dangers surrounding it.

Caesar sat up and the scene disappeared. He swung his feet off his bed and stood up, low background music starting as the sensors on the floor registered his body temperature.

“Good morning, Caesar,” Grace said.

Caesar didn’t answer her, moving instead to the bathroom.

“Don’t act grumpy,” she said, her voice following him through the air particles.

She, he thought. She, she, she. Caesar smiled. There was no she. No person at all. There was an entity which held no gender, no physical body even, that connected all the way back to The Genesis in some chain that Caesar never tried to contemplate. The voice he heard now was nothing more than electrically charged particles bouncing off one another to form speech patterns that resembled a human. Even now, if he was turn to turn and try to find Grace, he would see only empty space, because Grace couldn’t take physical form.

“You’re too cheery in the morning,” he said to her. “Now give me some privacy.” He shut the door to the bathroom, but only out of a long ingrained habit. Grace would know everything he did in this house regardless of doors or locks or anything else. She would know if a hormone inside him raised a milliliter above its normal level. Still, he shut the door because that’s what he’d grown up doing, and at least she would shut up if he asked for some privacy. Grace may not be human, but she was polite, which was more than Caesar could say about other assistants. He had lucked out with her and he was happy for that, because he didn’t want to have to find another assistant—didn’t want to go through that awkward stage of learning each other. His friends told him horror stories about such things. An assistant wanting to listen to music until three in the morning when his friend needed to be up at five. Neither of them able to agree on the healthiest diet. The list went on and on. No, Grace may not be human, but she certainly wasn’t the worst intelligence he could have come across.

An entity granted free will, just like himself. He once wondered why The Genesis wouldn’t simply create drones that did everything it commanded of them, why create applications that could choose? The answer was simple, even if no one else asked the question—not even The Genesis had the power to control everything all the time. By giving its applications free will, but programming them with the knowledge of why they were here, of their purpose, it could trust them to make the decisions it needed them to. The Genesis created an unlimited number of free willed entities, yet all of them were completely committed to its cause.

Caesar opened the bathroom door and walked out into his bedroom.

“What time is it?”

“Seven-twelve. You’ve got forty-eight minutes to get to work. You’re behind schedule,” Grace answered.

“Do I have to go?” Caesar asked, Grace already extending the clothes she had picked out for him from the ceiling. He grabbed the underwear and pulled them up.

“No, you can always stay at home, but I don’t advise it.”

Caesar didn’t wince, but his eyes narrowed. He saw the puddle, the only puddle like it he had ever witnessed, up on the stage where the man had simply ceased to exist in about thirty seconds.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “I can be stupid sometimes. You know that’s not what I mean. No one gets liquidated because they skip work. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Caesar grabbed the pants and put them on. Why had he gone back to that scene just now? How many years ago was that now? Twenty? Had to be, and he had never seen another liquidation. They didn’t even have public liquidations anymore, and certainly someone wouldn’t be killed because they decided not to show up to work. So why think about that?

“It’s not your fault,” he said, putting his arms through the sleeves of his shirt.

“I’m actually surprised the memory doesn’t come to the surface more often, given your profession,” she answered. Grace had a lot of positives, but her clinical diagnoses weren’t one of them.

“Thank The Genesis for small miracles, I suppose.”

“Indeed,” Grace answered. “It’s seven-seventeen. Time to get moving. I’ll have breakfast ready for you on the ride.”

*

Caesar entered his office and looked at his desk. He’d rather go to it, but knew he couldn’t. Knew that he needed to sync before anything else happened.

He had his specific time to be at the sync, a specific time that The Genesis would send out the information necessary for him. These things had to be ordered, especially with the amount of information The Genesis took in and gave out daily. Time for certain applications to upload the information they collected, time for The Genesis to relay information out to both the human populace and its applications. One day, perhaps, data would flow freely up and down the levels of communication, but for now, even The Genesis had to establish order to keep everything from collapsing, from overloading.

He walked to the wall and placed his hand into the sync, thirty seconds before his download was to begin. It was Monday and this would be the largest data download of the week, given that he hadn’t synced in the past forty-eight hours. He hated this part of the week. Hated it worse than the rest of the week combined.

Caesar read a lot in his spare time. He didn’t download, like the rest of society, but actually grabbed an ancient ereader and went through books that way. It took longer, a lot longer, but that just meant it passed the time. He knew that none of his friends, certainly not his brother, spent their time reading like that, which was fine. When you download, like he was about to do now, you couldn’t savor the intricacies of what you learned. It all came at once, like being thrown in a pool, rather than stepping in slowly and letting your body adjust to the temperature. When he read, he could take in each word one by one, letting his brain do the work of sifting and sorting, of filing. When he downloaded, all that was done for him, and in the end, the process was more efficient, but not as enjoyable.

He read a lot about the early twenty-first century. Grace said he was mildly obsessed, and she might have been right. The Singularity was built, and then The Genesis born during that time period. Caesar’s entire world was created from those years, so he dug into any book he could find on the subject. He imagined that these Monday data downloads were similar to what the office drones in the early two-thousands had felt about their email after a weekend. So much to read and most of it completely worthless.

“You’re sitting here thinking about how you hate this download, aren’t you?” Grace said, whispering so that no one else heard. He ignored her and pushed his hand down on the sensor.

The information rushed in, and Caesar stared straight ahead, not glancing anywhere, acting like the information was drowning his mind. His mind wasn’t supposed to keep up with any of the surroundings, any of the people in the room, anything else at all besides the tremendous amount of information being shoved inside it. Caesar and Grace both knew what was supposed to happen, what happened to everyone else when they downloaded information, and they both knew that nothing resembling overload occurred to Caesar. Grace, technically, should have reported it immediately, but she never had. Even now, with his hand taking in all of the information from the entire weekend, every word uttered by the crop, she was breaking protocol. Not laws. There were no laws. There was only protocol, but Grace could find herself deactivated if her withholding ever came to the surface.

The human brain never evolved to take in information all at once. It evolved to take it in bit by bit, discerning what was necessary and what could be discarded. Thus, when the brain synced with part of The Genesis, it couldn’t pay attention to the rest of the world; it was completely overwhelmed. It happened to everyone. Except Caesar. He realized it when he was six years old, looking around him at the rest of his crop, all of them downloading protocols for their first class. Each one taking on glazed eyes and slack faces while Caesar remained alert, taking in both the information from The Genesis and the information reality continued feeding him. He should have been liquidated right then. Grabbed up from the sync and pulled to some back room where he ended up in his own puddle. Maybe through luck or maybe some instinctual notion inside Caesar, but he had donned the same look as his classmates and continued to do so ever since. For all The Genesis’ power, all its knowledge, it missed that single thing about him. For years, Caesar feared that each time he stuck his hand into a sync, The Genesis would find him and it would melt him just like all the others deemed Unnecessary. Nothing ever happened though. He kept moving through life and now when he downloaded he adopted the stale face of a cow and thought nothing of it.

He was Unnecessary, though. Regardless of what happened, he had to remember that. If The Genesis ever found out, if Grace ever malfunctioned and decided to blab, he was Unnecessary.

You’re one second away from liquidation.

But isn’t everyone? His mind answered.

The download finished and he went to his desk, thinking on the information. Everything appeared okay with the crop, but they tested today. Every year he tested a new crop, and every year this day was the most important of the year. The Genesis, and really, the world, needed to understand who was Necessary and who wasn’t. The test today helped determine that. It wasn’t the only way they found out such things, but it was a major piece. Caesar’s whole team would be here within an hour; they would wake the crops up, give them breakfast, and then bring the children to the testing room.

*

Caesar sat at his desk, the wall in front of him cycling through the different rooms of his supervisors. Twenty million children preparing to sync. The whole process still struck awe in him. The sheer power of The Genesis could be best seen on this day, as twenty million children were organized for a testing that determined life or death—all of them four years old and having been raised and reared by The Genesis. Caesar controlled Quadrant Two, three other quadrants around the world producing the same amount of children yearly. At the age of four, their IQ level was tested, and again at six, and then at eight one last IQ test was administered combined with a personality profile to hopefully determine acceptance of the current system. Today was the first test for this crop, the one where they pruned the largest number.

He watched his team, as they watched those below them. Things usually performed fine without any reason to stress—the main need for caution was to ensure accurate testing. They wouldn’t get another chance for this, not for two years. If they failed today, the classes, the programming still continued. Not a single day could be wasted, not if the system was going to continue to pump out twenty million children per year.

Years ago, when Caesar first took this job, he calculated out the reasoning behind the twenty million number. It was complex, nearly too much for him to handle, but he finally came to a solid foundation of The Genesis’ reasoning. It included death rates, future production needs for society, the population’s wishes (the most fickle part of the whole equation), as well as the Earth’s ability to sustain population growth. Numerous other tiny calculations played into the overall equation, but those were the main pieces. And thus, a fairly consistent twenty million children from his quadrant per year.

All of these children, grown like crops, and then gifted to loving parents waiting on them. Even now, two parents were somewhere waiting on their child that would be delivered to them in four years’ time. If they passed this test. And passing meant you didn’t do too well or too poorly. Passing meant average. That’s what they were shooting for here, all of them—a great big average.

*

“How did it go?” Leon asked.

“Fine,” Caesar said, sitting down across the table.

“You ever had a year when it didn’t go fine? Every year you freak out right before this and every year you say it went fine.” Leon scrolled through the menu on the table in front of him, his eyes moving to flick through different options, the table registering and reacting to the tiny movements. “I really wish they would upgrade these things, get the menus that overlay the food right across your eyes.”

Caesar blinked, opening his own menu in front of him. “One year things weren’t fine. The problem is we didn’t know it for two more years. One year a boy’s hand wasn’t placed exactly right in the sync and we missed him. He went on for two more years and by the time we retested, he had created two separate groups inside the crop. That ended up almost costing us four thousand children, and even though we didn’t liquidate them right then, they’re still being watched now and that was seven years ago.”

Leon didn’t look up. “Why didn’t you liquidate them?”

“All things work for The Genesis, my man. I imagine it didn’t want to deal with what thousands of parents would say when they found out their children had been liquidated because a single child didn’t have his hand positioned just right, and thus someone a bit too smart slipped through a hole.”

“Did I tell you April and I are thinking of applying?”

“For a child?” Caesar looked up. “When did that come about?”

“Past week. It’ll be eight years before we get one, and by that time I’ll be thirty-eight, so if we’re going to do it, we should probably do it now. Any idea what the likelihood of being accepted is?”

“That’s administration. I’m in operations. Two totally different silos,” Caesar said, blinking to make his choice at one of the burgers below him. “You know what you’re having yet?”

“Slice of pizza. You?”

“Bacon cheeseburger,” Caesar said. “You sure you want a kid?”

“Hell no, but by the time I’m thirty-eight, I’ll probably be ready for one. I mean, we get eight more years of marriage before we have to actually change our lives. I don’t know how people made the choice before The Singularity—to think that once you’re pregnant you get nine more months of freedom and then it’s over for eighteen years. Ludicrous.”

Caesar smiled. “Crazy how the world managed to get around for a few billion years before The Genesis, huh? All those people having to spend all that time with their children. Sickens me.”

“Hey, you know what I’m saying. Why spend eighteen when you can spend ten and get the exact same thing out of it? You guys, or The Genesis, teaches them everything they need to behave in society, and we end up getting the fun parts. No changing diapers. No punishments. Just the love part. That’s what I’m looking for here,” Leon answered, smiling back.

“And April?”

“It was her idea.”

Caesar nodded. “You know where to apply?”

“She’ll figure all that out. I agreed to it, the rest is on her.”

“You know the requirements right? It’s not all fun and games, not all love. The Genesis is strict about what they want from you guys once they turn the child over. You fuck around and that kid ends up a delinquent after eight years of being raised by The Genesis, it’s not going to turn out well for you. You get that, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. But I mean, how often does that happen?”

Caesar knew the answer although he shouldn’t. He wanted to tell Leon that it happened with about three percent of all parents, but saying that was…

Unnecessary.

“No. Those numbers aren’t published. Not that much, I’d imagine though. You’d hear about it more if so.”

“Exactly,” Leon said. “April and I aren’t complete fuck ups. We’ll be fine.”

“Well, it’s eight years off. Maybe you’ll find out how to fuck up by then,” Caesar said.

Chapter Five

“It’s here!” His brother shouted from the living room.

Caesar knew what it was, could still remember how he had felt at the age of sixteen when his came. He didn’t remember shouting like his brother, but then again, he couldn’t possibly feel as enthusiastic as Cato about the future. To Cato, this day was bigger than maybe any other day he would experience. To Caesar, it had felt closer to a prison sentence—monumental, but not in the way it was for his brother.

Caesar went to his parents’ house after dinner; he knew that Cato would receive his marching orders soon, and part of him didn’t want to be there when they came. Cato would be excited, thrilled even. The world was finally opening to him and he could begin planning for his future based on what he found out. Caesar wasn’t sure he could fake that enthusiasm. Caesar wasn’t sure he would be able to look at his brother and honestly say, congratulations, because—

Well, what would he congratulate Cato for?

Just shut up, he told himself. He sat at the kitchen table and watched as his mother trotted from the kitchen, hurrying to find out what his brother now knew; his dad had probably stood up from the couch, was probably moving to hover over Cato’s shoulder. The whole family wanted to know. Except Caesar. He hadn’t thought it would feel like this. He knew he wouldn’t ever be able to match his brother’s joy, but depression? A complete despondence at getting up from the kitchen table and walking into the living room?

“Get in there,” Grace said in his ear.

She was right—always looking out for him even if he wasn’t looking out for himself. He needed to be there for Cato, needed to congratulate him even if he saw no reason in it. Like congratulating someone for growing old. It simply happens, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He stood from his chair and walked across the kitchen and into the living room.

Cato held the digital scroll in his hands, the letter clearly from The Genesis.

“What’s it say?” He asked from the entrance to the kitchen.

His brother turned his head to look at Caesar, a smile broad across Cato’s face. “Public transportation!” Cato shouted, shaking the scroll as if it was real paper and not a tangible hologram.

Caesar plastered a smile on his face while the entirety of his stomach felt ready to eject everything he’d eaten that day.

*

Caesar leaned his head back against the seat. He didn’t close his eyes but looked ahead of him, taking in the train. Public transportation! Caesar didn’t even know why they called it ‘public’ anymore. Private transportation didn’t exist, no vehicles from the days of old, when one could decide where they went and what time they arrived. His brother was really going into the transportation sector. The word public was Unnecessary, when there was no alternative.

The train flew through the air as easily as any bird ever had, following a path laid out before it, knowing intuitively where every other train was in relation to itself. Even the word train was a misnomer, because the thing flew like a jet, not attached to any rails, but without the space constrictions of a plane. Caesar looked out the window at the city below him, but he didn’t need to; he simply could have looked towards his feet and seen the city beneath him, the entire train transparent. He could see other trains hovering near the ground, letting off their passengers, others speeding along just like his own, taking other people to other places.

To somewhere else.

Caesar wanted to go anywhere. Not somewhere.

His brother was just so excited. And how could he not be? This train was magnificent, a marvel of ingenuity mixed with a strange mechanical beauty. The amount of people transported around on these things daily would boggle the mind if someone tried to actually figure out the number. Trains like these, all over the world, transferring every living human back and forth on a day in, day out basis. Cato would be a part of this. Cato would help make it move, help get people from one point of their lives to the next. Cato would be there when the next generation of trains rolled out, capable of doing things that no human had ever dreamed of. Cato would see, most likely, the time when trains were done away with and The Genesis rolled out something new, something greater, something grander. Cato would work in a needed sector and he would be one of the people to keep the world turning.

He should be excited.

And yet, Caesar had a strange urge to kill his brother. To simply snap his neck and watch as the last of the life in him expired from his eyes. Caesar didn’t want his brother to have to go through any of that, any of the things he just thought about. The rest of his brother’s life had been planned out today, just as Caesar’s own had been seventeen years ago. Caesar received his own letter in his scroll, telling him that he was scheduled for Population Control. He had risen to the highest spot he could in his geographic area, but so what? So fucking what? He couldn’t move over to transportation if he wanted. He couldn’t quit, not really—not if he wanted any kind of real life. He had to go to work every day and he had to go home and he had to do it over and over until he died. And the truth was, he had no idea when that would be. Every year The Genesis’ medical advancements seemed to grow at an exponential pace, so maybe he would end up living this life much longer than he could currently anticipate. Maybe he’d live forever, and continue to go into work and look at the same crop of children, always trying to weed out the ones who didn’t meet specification. Weeding out the Unnecessary.

His brother wasn’t even getting that opportunity. His brother would simply make sure the trains didn’t break down.

That’s what Cato was excited over, and Caesar couldn’t say a word about what he actually thought.

*

“You see what I’m saying, right?”

Grace was quiet for a few moments. “I see what you want me to understand, yes.”

“But you don’t agree with it?” Caesar asked. He sat on his couch, the entertainment center in front of him shut down, the lights in the living room turned off. Only darkness. No distractions. Just his thoughts and Grace.

“You want choice; you want your brother to have choice. That can’t happen, though. You know what happened when humans were allowed that. You know where that road leads.”

Caesar sighed. Maybe. He knew probably better than anyone else, certainly more than anyone he had ever met. “They don’t even see it, though, Grace. Like, my brother has never even considered that having a choice in this, in the rest of his life, might be better. To him, the status quo is more than enough.”

“What’s the point of all this, Caesar? You’ve got work in four hours and you’re sitting here talking to me about the way things have been for the past thousand years. You think you’re the first person to have these thoughts?” Grace moved across the living room as she spoke, her voice pacing back and forth ten feet in front of Caesar. She always paced when he frustrated her.

“Am I?” He asked.

“No. Now answer my question, what’s the point of this?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sighing. “I just feel bad for him.”

“But he feels fine. Isn’t it enough that he’s happy?”

“Maybe it is.”

Caesar stopped talking then, eventually falling asleep on his couch.

Chapter Six

Quarterly Report

Quadrant One

The first quarter of 1232 E.S. brought quite a bit of growth in Quadrant One, both for humanity and The Genesis.

A major breakthrough in medical advancements developed out of Quadrant One: The Genesis, as publicized last year, began a pilot operation to determine how Alzheimer’s disease might be reversed. After an intensive year of studies, The Genesis is proud to announce that it discovered a cure for the debilitating disease. No humans will need watch a loved one slowly digress into a state of dementia, nor have it happen to themselves. One pill, taken at any point before the onset of the disease, erases all but a .00001% chance that the disease can develop. The Genesis calculated ten years until complete eradication. The medicine, titled M8909, will be ready for widespread distribution in Quadrant One at the beginning of the third quarter. Take a moment to rejoice in this, especially if you’ve had a family member fall victim to such a horrible disease.

The Genesis tested twenty million children this past year, and in its relentless pursuit of perfection, the testing resulted in less than one percent of our children qualifying as Unnecessary. The first group ever tested, showed an Unnecessary rate of 75%. The improvement is massive. The Genesis calculated that within fifty years, all children created will be deemed necessary. Soon, all parents will be able to take their children home without wondering if they’re adequate for society. Soon, all parents will be free from worry. From the moment they are selected as capable parents, they will be guaranteed their child.

While war is a thing of the past, something that no human alive has ever experienced, it is necessary to remember that this is the 1,231st year of a war free Earth.

A new pilot is starting in Quadrant One, which will take fifteen thousand volunteers and last three months. As is well known, The Genesis is trying to make planetary colonization a real possibility in the event that our sun burns out or some other disaster falls across Earth. While it is close to determining the exact needs for interplanetary travel, it needs to understand what type of persons would be capable of handling such a venture. Volunteerism sign-ups will be pushed out to scrolls over the next few weeks.

As the report progresses, you will see the production amounts for all needed goods, and The Genesis is proud to announce a waste percentage of less than .05%. In quarter two, the goal is to push that waste down to .045%, thus making the entirety of Earth, as well as humanity, more efficient.

The Genesis recommends you read the entire report, and please send all questions to the appropriate contacts listed inside.

Chapter Seven

“That is just great, Caesar. You must be so proud of him.”

Caesar looked at the plate in front of him. His mind drifted to the piece of meat, the cattle that had been grown in a lab rather than born and raised on a field. It made for a cleaner environment. It rid the world of barbaric factory farming. Now it was laboratory farming, more humane. The cattle need never live, need never die either. The Genesis rolled out laboratory based meat a few centuries ago; Caesar had never tasted a cow actually raised on a pasture. There was no need to. Had Leon or April ever thought about this? Ever really looked at their meat and wondered if cow grown in a petri dish tasted similar to those that ate grass?

“Do you think there is any place we could actually buy a real cow? Like off a farm or something and have it butchered and then we could freeze it and cook it when we’re ready? Does anything like that exist anymore?” Caesar asked.

Leon laughed. “What?”

“A steak. Like, do you know if we can find a real steak somewhere, a real cow?”

“Why would you want to do that?” April asked.

“I don’t know. You ever wonder what it tastes like?”

“No,” she said without a beat in between his questions and her answer. “All of that nonsense almost killed the environment, all those cows, and the way they were treated? No. Just no. You do?”

“Hush,” Grace said in a voice barely audible. “You talk to me like this. Not them.”

Caesar stared down at his plate. Grace was right, probably. What would he gain talking about this? This wasn’t one of the books that Caesar read in his spare time, wasn’t Orwell’s 1984; police wouldn’t be waiting outside for him when he finished eating, but it could possibly put eyes on him that needn’t be there. Caesar knew his gravest sin, and it wasn’t wondering about whether grass fed cows tasted different than lab generated cows. It was his intelligence. It was that he thought these things at all. That’s what The Genesis didn’t want, that’s what was Unnecessary. He knew it was right, that intelligence wasn’t needed in this society—not with The Genesis, not with The Singularity having occurred. He should be eradicated and his genes not allowed to continue. He could talk about cows and whatever else he wanted to, really, as long as The Genesis didn’t test his intelligence. If that happened, though, what he thought no longer mattered; all importance rested with what his brain could do—and then, Bye-bye, Caesar. Nice knowing you. No need to worry about showing up for work anymore, because you’re going to end in a puddle behind some glass container. Easier to clean up that way, ya know?

And still, he couldn’t shut up.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I’d like to try it sometime.” Caesar looked up and met April’s eyes.

“I don’t think they have farms like that anymore,” Leon said.

“You’re probably right.” He put a bite of the steak in his mouth.

“So what are you guys doing for Cato?” Leon asked, obviously trying to change the subject. The whole conversation felt awkward for all involved; only Caesar wanted to push it. There was a scab here and he wanted to pick at it, even though it might hurt. He wanted to see what was underneath the scab, whatever that might be, blood or disease. He wanted to know exactly why April stared at him so seriously.

“Why would we do something for him?”

Again, Leon laughed, but not the surprised laugh he had made with the cow comment. This laugh didn’t sound like there was any humor in it at all. It sounded like he laughed because he didn’t know what else to do.

“Because he just received his placement?” April said, her eyebrows rising.

“Everyone receives a placement. Do you take someone out to celebrate when they hit puberty?” Caesar asked. He didn’t raise his eyes from his plate. That might be too much, saying this and challenging them with his eyes.

“Puberty?” April laughed now, mocking him. “This isn’t puberty, Caesar. He just found out what he’s going to be doing for the rest of his life.”

“Shut up,” Grace said. “Don’t say anything else. You hear me?”

He heard her but didn’t care. He was in his friends’ house. Should he not speak openly? If not here, then where? Only to an application? Is that who should hear these things and no one else?

“Someone told him what he’s going to be doing for the rest of his life. Someone assessed his capabilities and said, ‘here, this is where you’ll fit in nicely.’ Is that something we should celebrate, April?”

She dropped her fork on her plate, and the sound of metal on glass seemed to echo forever in the dining room, saying more than words could.

“You got the quarter one update, right?” She asked.

He nodded.

“Are you not happy with that? My mother, right now, has Alzheimer’s; she doesn’t even know who I am when I show up to see her. Now I know I’ll never get it and I’ll never have to watch Leon get it either. That not enough for you? How about the war stat that we so easily gloss over now simply because we don’t know what war is like. You’re not the only one that reads, Caesar. I’ve read what happened. I know what sarin gas is. I know what nuclear warheads are. And I also know that those things don’t exist anymore, that when Leon and I have a kid, I’ll never have to worry about him being sent to war for some rich person. Are you not happy with those things?”

Caesar finally looked up from his plate. He looked at Leon first, trying to judge where he was at. Leon leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. A smirk hinted at the corners of his lips, but his eyes weren’t quite jiving with the smirk. His eyes glinted with something that might have been fear.

Caesar looked to April.

“Maybe I’m just an unhappy person,” he said, smiling and popping another piece of steak in his mouth.

Leon laughed, real, hardy, and April smiled too.

The meal went on.

“You’re losing your mind,” Grace whispered.

*

“You heard him? Was he being serious?”

Leon didn’t know. He didn’t know, really, what his friend was talking about. Caesar had left after dinner, and for the first time in his life, Leon was relieved that he wasn’t around. He’d never seen Caesar act like that before, talk like that, stare at both of them with such intensity. The whole thing was surreal. Leon picked up the last plate on the table and brought it to the sink, placing it on the pile. He reached to the right and pressed the start button; a plastic barrier moved over the plates and the wash cycle began.

“Is he okay?” Rachel asked.

“Can you leave us alone for a little bit?” Leon asked April’s assistant.

“Sure thing.”

The application would still be there, listening to them, but Leon couldn’t do anything about that. If he wanted complete privacy, he would need to fire both of their assistants, but that wasn’t happening. They both needed their applications, and if it meant all their conversations were monitored, it was a trade he’d gladly make.

“So, was he being serious, or was he putting us on?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard him talk like that,” Leon said. “I mean, he started laughing at the end.”

“Yeah, but, it was still weird.” April walked to the living room and Leon followed. “Who the hell talks like that? Wanting to eat an actual cow? I mean, it’s disgusting to even think about and he was asking us if we knew where to get one. Then his brother. I don’t even know where to go with that. He wasn’t happy for his brother? Cross continent travel is only going to continue increasing, and God, if they get the interplanetary travel thing up and running, he could be on that too. How could he not be happy for him?”

Leon sat down on the couch and watched as April turned on the entertainment center. People sprung up from the floor in front of them, but she kept them muted even as the lights dimmed around them.

It really was a good placement. It wasn’t like the kid was told he would be on the wiring team or something like that, dealing with mainframes and updating them daily. Plus, if he had been chosen for that, it was because his aptitudes matched it. Had he gotten something like wiring, the kid would be ecstatic because it would fit him. So why wasn’t Caesar excited? His own placement had been spectacular. The entire results for Quadrant One could be attributed to The Genesis and Caesar. The man was almost singlehandedly making the world a better place because of his placement.

“He had to be joking,” Leon said.

“I really hope so. If not, they might need to brain scan him and see if he doesn’t have something wrong up there. Like a tumor or something. People don’t just start talking crazy like that unless something is wrong.”

Leon nodded, wondering if that was actually the case. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was a one-time thing and even talking about brain scans and tumors was too much. Caesar might have just had a bad day. He might not have slept the night before, or he might be pissed at Grace—any number of things could have triggered it. A brain tumor was out of the question.

“Go ahead and turn up the volume,” he said.

“I mean, if anything I hope it’s a tumor. Because if it’s not, then he’s not making a whole lot of sense,” April said as the sound of people in front of them rose.

Chapter Eight

“I told you to keep your mouth shut.”

“What the hell is this about?” Caesar asked.

“You don’t know how lucky you are to have me,” Grace answered. “Literally, you have no idea. They’re going to scan your brain for irregularities.”

“Why?” Caesar looked at the scroll in his hand. He could read what it said, ‘health check-up’, but why? He got his yearly physical with an application and that had sufficed for thirty-two years. Except now, two days after dinner with the Bastille’s. Now The Genesis wanted to run another check-up, the second in a year, which never happened. Not for him or anyone else.

“From what I can tell, Leon and April kept talking about what you said, and their assistants picked it up and sent it in. So now The Genesis wants to make sure there isn’t anything wrong with you. Like is cancer beginning to grow.”

“Jesus,” Caesar said.

“And that. You’ve got to stop saying that. When was the last time you heard someone say the word Jesus? You pick up these damned words from your books and then you use them like they’re common place. They’ve registered you now, Caesar. They know there was an irregularity around you that was strong enough for your best friends to discuss it. This isn’t something you look at lightly. Before Sunday you were a great worker, a model citizen. Now you’re flagged.”

Sometimes Caesar wished he could see Grace. That the thing he spoke with was more than a shadow in the air. He knew he could order her one, and when the mechanical thing showed up, she could download herself to it, but that wouldn’t be worth much. The presence wouldn’t be Grace, it would be a machine that rolled off an assembly line somewhere.

“So I have to get the scan?”

“Yeah. Of course you have to.”

“Is that all they’re looking for, possible diseases?”

“As far as I know, yes. That doesn’t mean that’s the whole truth though. You know The Genesis doesn’t have to grant me any knowledge. Or it can feed me things that aren’t true. So, it could be looking for anything.”

They didn’t speak about it. It was never named. Naming his intelligence would be more dangerous than anything he had said a few nights ago. Saying the truth about himself could mean a death sentence. They both knew though, Grace as well as him. They both knew and yet Grace kept quiet. Applications were supposed to be capable of love. They were supposed to be fully self-actualized, able to form relationships and have the whole range of human emotions as well as to monitor them much more effectively than people. Caesar didn’t know if he believed it. He never asked about Grace’s personal life, never asked about what relationships she had besides him. That was a part of her he didn’t care to know about, and he didn’t hide from the why. He was glad he had Grace, but she was what she was: a computer. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t Cato or Leon or his father or his mother. She had been assigned to him the same as he had been assigned to population control, and it just so happened that they clicked. Better than clicked. She protected him. It didn’t take her long to understand that he had slipped through the tests, that his IQ was far off the charts, let alone what The Genesis would deem necessary. But that was it. They were a business partnership. She allowed him to live life easier and, in return, The Genesis had a connection to him. If he went further, if he found out more about her emotions, then he might have to consider that she wasn’t just an application.

“You’re not here at all, are you? You’re in your head thinking and probably not about what’s on that scroll in front of you. Am I right?”

He smiled, his eyes still on the words but not registering any of them.

“You need to focus here, Caesar. The scan will take place today and if they’re looking for anything else, it’s going to be impossible for you to hide it from them.”

“So what do I do?” Caesar asked.

“You hope they’re not looking for anything else and you shut the hell up when talking to your friends.”

*

Caesar knew when it began. The scan entered through his right ear, and he felt it wiggling inside like a worm. His hand reached up at first, shocked, but there wasn’t anything to grab, because the scan bounced through air particles exactly like Grace did. The Genesis sent it out and it finally arrived, working its way into his brain, dispersing inside his head and starting to search through all his neurons.

Grace knew a lot, but not everything. He hadn’t meant to keep this from her, but once he realized he had, he decided to keep it that way. He trusted Grace, and more, trusted that she wouldn’t malfunction and suddenly The Genesis would know what he really was. Even so, having some secrets could end up better in the long term.

You mean working at Population Control for the rest of your life? Is that the long term?

The scan was almost inside and those thoughts had to shut up now. It could search for cancers and weak blood vessels that might burst, but it could also interpret thoughts, feelings. It could, without a doubt, determine neuron count and synapse speed, which could lead it to understanding his intelligence. Caesar couldn’t do anything about his neuron count; that was set, and unless he performed a lobotomy, his neuron count wouldn’t change.

Caesar closed his eyes.

This is why the syncs never registered him. This was why he had made it to thirty-three without being discovered. He simply slowed his thinking down. People had done it before, a thousand years ago, religious men called monks had the ability to nearly shut their brains down. They called it enlightenment, the ability to be completely in the moment. Caesar came across the possibility in a book, an offhand mention of the monks, and he had read and read and read and then practiced, practiced, practiced. He didn’t know what the monks could accomplish, not outside of the words he found in books from years and years ago, but he…well, it was what he thought of as his ‘drone-mind’.

The scan might be able to count his neurons, but when it left him, it wasn’t going to think he was much higher than average intelligence.

Caesar sat in his chair at work as the scan finally found its way inside, and he felt the particles dispersing like sand, coating his brain and beginning to sink in.

Chapter Nine

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I feel like everyone should already know what The Singularity is, that this chapter might be unnecessary. And at the same time, Caesar’s story isn’t over yet, so maybe things will change. Maybe if this is read in another thousand years, people will know The Singularity as something that happened a long time ago, but something of the past. I’ve read about The Crusades, learned them during my Production Season before I was shipped off to my parents, but they are inconsequential to me. I know that a lot of people died and I know it was because of religion. A time in history of drastic importance, and that’s all I know.

I don’t want The Singularity to become that. I don’t want anyone to forget what it meant. To forget what we did to ourselves. Caesar wasn’t the first to recognize it; he wasn’t even the first to say we should disagree with it. He was only the first person talented enough to have a chance at destroying it.

In the early twenty-first century, humanity played with fire. Everyone knew it. They knew they were venturing into untested territory, completely unknown. What could we possibly understand about intelligence? Not artificial intelligence, not AI. Artificial had nothing to do with what they were creating. Artificial implies fake, implies not real. The intelligence they worked on was real, the same as their own. Caesar showed me books, showed me where to find accurate history on it, and humanity believed they were Gods. Maybe they were right. They were giving birth to the first intelligent life form besides themselves; or, rather, they were creating it. Designing it. Programming circuits in a way so that when they turned on, they would no longer need programming.

In the early twenty-first century, humanity marveled at their genius and someone clicked a button on a computer, and gave birth to The Singularity.

The word doesn’t mean anything. It’s a word made up before The Singularity even occurred, a word made up fifty years before humans had the power to create The Singularity. Now, if it means anything, it’s the passing of humans as the most advanced species on Earth. It’s the beginning of a new era. Even the way time was dated changed: no longer Common Era but now Era of Singularity.

The word originally meant when computers gained self-awareness. That’s how they thought of it back then, that this intelligence they created would live in circuits and wireless transmission signals, and that because of the vast amount of information at its proverbial fingertips, it would rapidly gain in intelligence. They tried to predisposition the intelligence to one of giving, of nurturing, like some kind of nurse.

They were frightened, without a doubt. Everyone was scared, except for maybe the scientists creating the thing. They were only eager. It was their life’s work, how could they not be? The rest of the world though? Vast meetings were held across the globe. Fierce debates with the pros and cons on both arising. The scientists came from all different nationalities—a peculiar term now—but the work was being done in The United States of America. That’s Quadrant Three now, or rather, part of it is, a small sliver bleeds into Quadrant Four.

Caesar showed me these things.

I used to work with kids after they were released from the crops to their parents. The profession used to be called education, or teachers; in my time, we were referred to as mentors, but it’s all the same. Our job, as it was in the past, consisted of training children to be productive members of society, with productive being whatever the ruling class wanted from them. The ruling class used to be rich humans. Now it’s The Singularity.

I’m getting off track. Let me try again.

The world was scared but at that time, there wasn’t a lot they could do without declaring war on The United States of America. The rest of the planet would have needed to invade and physically stop those working on the project. I think that if they saw the end game, that’s exactly what would have occurred. Quadrant Three would be nothing more than rubble, perhaps wildlife still not having reclaimed that piece of Earth. Instead though, they didn’t let their fear dictate their actions. The Singularity would occur; intelligence outside of humanity would exist.

Someone pressed a button, somewhere, and humanity became God. Caesar asked me once whether God ever thought that his creation might enslave Him?

So what is The Singularity besides a new era? What is The Genesis?

Both are names that humanity created and that the intelligence adopted to make the transition easier on humanity.

The Singularity is the theory that there could be an intelligence outside of a human head, an intelligence that existed everywhere at the same time, that could travel across continents in milliseconds. The Singularity is the theory that there could be one intelligence knowing everything at once.

The Genesis is that intelligence.

Humanity didn’t understand the possibilities. They thought they could shut it down. They thought that a click could send a virus through the entire system, wiping out the entity. They thought that it would remain on their computers, in their wireless waves. They thought it would remain in the cage they created for it. There is no place where this intelligence rests. There is no cage. There never could be. The Genesis is all around us, in the very air we breathe. It moves in and out of your body just as oxygen does. Even now, as I write this, The Genesis is here, my hand moving through it with each stroke of the pen. There isn’t a mainframe. There isn’t something that can be burnt down, that can be destroyed. The intelligence is as much a part of this world as sunlight. When they realized that, it was too late to do anything about it. Their best calculation said that The Genesis’ intelligence would surpass humanity’s own in fifty years. At that point, they were hoping that they had raised it as they would a child, teaching it morality, and their creation would turn into a God itself, a just God. If not, they would upload the virus and kill it. Great experiment, but it didn’t work out; so let’s go home.

It took The Genesis two hours and thirty-three minutes to surpass all of humanity’s combined intelligence. It took it another hour to discover, map out, and execute its path from the on-line cage of ones and zeros to move physically onto Earth. It first exited the cage from a computer in New Zealand, a country that is now part of Quadrant Two—and I only tell you this because it interests me, and so might interest some of you. A sort of hermit lived on one of the hills, but he had Internet access. The intelligence—The Genesis—wasn’t one hundred percent sure it could survive as electrons outside, so it needed seclusion. It terminated the computer, causing a slight fire inside the hard drive, and exited there—through the fire. It latched onto the heat, and then the smoke, and then it moved out into the air. There was a chance that it would simply die, and had that happened, then humanity’s plan of using a virus might have worked. A virus could have set everything right, everything the way it was before.

The intelligence didn’t die though. It grew, replicating through air particles, and by the time humanity understood that the intelligence lived next to them the same as a neighbor, there wasn’t any way to put it back inside its cage.

The Genesis was born, and after six hours it had destroyed all of the plans created by the best minds humanity could offer.

Chapter Ten

Caesar had never tried to find an answer before, so why do it now?

“Do you want to die?” Grace asked him.

He didn’t give her an answer because he didn’t have one. He could tell her he didn’t want to die, but then why stand here in his living room and contemplate this.

“You got through the scan, why push it? What do you have to gain, Caesar? I’m not asking you this rhetorically; I really want an answer. What’s the point? What’s the end goal here?”

Again, he didn’t give her an answer because he didn’t have one. No end game. No goal. And still, he felt compelled. He didn’t know where these thoughts stemmed from. His brother’s placement? Maybe, but there had to be a seed before that. There had to be something that created this fire in his mind, something sparking for years, and only the gasoline of his brother’s placement allowing it to burn.

Regardless, he wanted an answer. He wanted to know the point of it.

Why liquidate? Why not just burn? Why not just throw in a hole and bury alive? Why liquidate?

There had to be a reason.

“I’m asking you, Caesar, not to do this. I’m begging you not to look into this. Just stop. Just let it go. Please.”

He didn’t answer.

Caesar walked to the window of his apartment and looked down at the city below. The Genesis’ ability to build cities showcased its talents as well as anything. Buildings went up and up and up until clouds covered the tops of each building. As long as the interiors maintained proper oxygen levels, the buildings could go as high as The Genesis wanted. When it built up and not out, it left massive amounts of space for wildlife to reign outside of the cities. It allowed for the Earth to be the Earth and for humans to be humans. Caesar’s apartment stood just below the cloud line, allowing him to see down. He looked at the streets below. He watched a train speed by his window, causing him to blink in surprise.

“Has anyone ever jumped out of a sky rise? Since The Singularity?” He asked Grace.

“The last one happened eleven hundred and fifty five years ago,” she said.

“Would it let me die if I did?”

“Most certainly. You would be Unnecessary if you were predisposed to self-destruct, to commit suicide. It wouldn’t want your genes replicated.”

He nodded.

“Don’t do it,” she said but by then it was too late.

Caesar pulled down a scroll over his window, reaching up into the air and simply gripping his hand like there was something actually there to pull down on, and then the glass scroll appeared. He used his fingertips to draw on the transparent board, a bright blue mark following the equations he created.

He didn’t know if any other human knew equations like these existed. He only knew that they would show him what he wanted, if he followed the path they created.

He stood there for hours, writing, scribbling, pushing the scroll down to the floor so that he had more space to write.

At the end of hour three he found his answer.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, staring at the blue marks in front of him.

*

The train’s doors opened and Caesar stepped out onto the street. He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t know what he was doing, really.

He had vomited at the foot of the scroll and then programmed his apartment into the next train available. When it arrived, he got on, and stared at the people around him. They didn’t know. None of them. They didn’t know and they didn’t care and there was no way in hell he could tell any of them. Even as he stared at them, they probably thought him insane. Probably thought him Unnecessary. Probably wondered why in the hell he was alive in the first place, how The Genesis hadn’t figured him out and liquidated him because PEOPLE DID NOT STARE WHEN THEY GOT ONTO THE TRAIN.

Caesar stood on the street not moving. He didn’t have anywhere to go, he only had to get away from his apartment, from that scroll. He couldn’t look at it anymore, couldn’t handle the formulas in front of him, couldn’t handle what they meant. And now, in a different place, thousands of feet below his apartment, he couldn’t get rid of the image in his mind.

He assumed The Genesis liquidated because it scared people, that had been the origin of it. But no, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the reason it melted human bodies. It could have just used crosses like the Romans if it only wanted to inspire fear. The reason behind it…

He took a step forward, the people passing along the street adjusting their paths as to not bowl him over.

How many children had he watched eat the dead? How many times had he watched them spoon something from a bowl into their mouth and have no idea that they ate those deemed Unnecessary.

Caesar felt his stomach churning again, felt that he might vomit on the street.

Such perfect sense. He couldn’t stand here and think that it didn’t fit The Genesis’ plan, its purpose for humanity. Those that were Unnecessary shouldn’t exist, and neither should the possibility that pieces of them are somehow replicated in the future. Caesar discovered liquidation didn’t kill tissue, indeed, it didn’t even kill the person; they still lived as that puddle inside the glass vat. And then the magic happened. The Genesis processed the DNA, understanding where the mistake was made, and then inserted a virus into the coded mistake. Then it fed the remains, a processed, jimmied up version of that DNA into the crops that Caesar looked over. The virus in the DNA moved into the children and removed the possibility that the same mistake would happen again. The Genesis was wiping out bad code. It had to liquidate in order to do it, though. It couldn’t burn, couldn’t allow the actual flesh to die.

The children Caesar looked over ate the living, and in doing so, radically altered their own DNA.

Caesar blinked, not realizing how dry his eyes were from staring straight ahead.

No war. No crime. No hate.

Peace. A healthy environment.

The Genesis achieved all of those things, and liquidation was a piece to the puzzle. Cannibalism helped it happen.

Caesar turned around and looked at the lane in front of him. You didn’t walk in the train lane, ever. They moved too fast for anyone to avoid. As soon as this one took off, the next would arrive, and if he were to take a step off the sidewalk, everything would end. He wouldn’t have to continue. He wouldn’t have to go to work every day and feed the living to the living. He wouldn’t have to know any of this. He wouldn’t have to be Unnecessary. He could just step off as soon as this train pulled away and everything would disappear. The world could keep turning and the people around him could keep walking their mindless paths and he wouldn’t need to deal with any of it.

Eleven hundred years since the last suicide.

It was time for another one. You could never have enough suicide.

Caesar stepped forward, waiting on the train to speed off.

“What are you doing?” Grace asked in his ear.

“You knew.”

“And I told you not to look into it. It doesn’t matter. It’s happened since the beginning, since the first crop, and now all of a sudden it’s a problem because you did some math up in your apartment?”

He shook his head, wishing that he could cast her away, could make her leave, could have these last few moments alone.

“I’ll report you. If you take another step, I’ll have The Genesis here and you locked down before you ever take a step into that lane,” she said.

“Then I die anyway,” he answered, taking another step forward. She wouldn’t report him. She wouldn’t turn him in, no more for this than she had for anything else about him.

The train in front of him took off. He had only a moment to step out before the next one arrived.

He took his step, his foot lowering onto the street.

“Hey!” Someone shouted behind him, and then his forward movement was halted and someone yanked him backwards, away from the lane, away from his choice.

Caesar watched the next train fly in, stopping in the exact place as the previous train, watched as his end simply parked and unloaded passengers.

He whipped around, the hand that had been on his shoulder pulling away just as quickly. “What the fuck?” He said.

A woman stood in front of him. Blonde hair to her shoulders and green eyes. A thin face and a thin body. She smiled at him, but her eyes weren’t gleeful, they were scared, scared of the man that she had just helped and then turned on her with a snake’s speed. Cursed her, even.

“I’m sorry. You just looked like you were about to end up under that train,” she said, her right foot taking a step backwards. “You’ve got to be careful around those things. They’ll never be able to stop in time.”

Caesar looked on, his anger dissipating. Shock caused it at first, shock at being told no, at being pulled away from something he already committed to. The woman here though, she hadn’t been telling him no, she’d been trying to help.

Caesar swallowed. “No, I’m sorry.” He looked down at his feet. “I wasn’t paying attention, I guess.”

“Okay,” the woman answered, her eyes not softening completely, still wary of him. She turned like she was about to walk away, and then came back to him. “Are you all right?”

“You need to get inside,” Grace whispered. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah. I was just thinking too hard. I’m sorry for cursing at you, thanks for that. I wasn’t paying attention at all.”

Her smile widened. “Just be more careful. You don’t want to end up a spot on the street. Have a good day,” she said and then walked off. Caesar stood watching her as she moved into the crowd of people. He wanted to say something else, but he didn’t know what. He wanted to call to her, to ask her to stand here just for another minute, because maybe then he could figure out what he wanted to say.

“Have you had enough?” Grace asked him. “Anything else you want to do down here? Maybe we could start writing your calculations out on the wall over there, just let everyone know at the same time?”

Caesar only watched the woman disappear into the crowd.

*

“They scanned my brain; I guess because how I was talking at your house.”

“A brain scan?”

“Yup. Looking for irregularities.”

Leon sighed. “Goodness. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Caesar said. “Tip top shape, I suppose.”

“I didn’t mean to get you in any trouble. April and I talked about it a little later, but we didn’t say much. Just that it was weird.”

Caesar took a sip of his beer. He didn’t really know why he called Leon up here. He certainly didn’t want April coming, so he had asked if Leon could meet him for a drink, by himself. Now they were here, drinking, and he wasn’t sure why. He couldn’t tell Leon anything that happened to him today. He couldn’t tell him about what he figured out in his apartment, couldn’t tell him about wanting to jump under a train.

“No big deal. I was joking around and I shouldn’t have been. I would have wondered the same thing if you had been saying it. Made no sense, any of it.”

Leon didn’t respond, just took a sip of his own drink and stared at the back of the bar. Caesar looked too, staring at the fish in it, swimming back and forth, completely mindless of what was going on around them.

Those aren’t real fish. Of course they weren’t, and what did that matter?

You’ve never seen a real fish. He hadn’t, but why would he? The oceans were nearly destroyed before The Genesis gained power. Why would he ever need to swim with real fish? He had the simulated one’s here, and if he wanted, he could even reach in and feel them, feel it wiggling in his hand, trying to free itself. Why did a real fish matter when he could touch one that felt and acted the same?

Because it’s not real. Because it’s a computer application. Because it’s electrical currents tricking your brain to think something is there when it’s not.

All those becauses and not one of them mattered to Leon. Not one of them mattered to April. Not one of them mattered to his brother or his father or anyone else he knew. So why did they matter to him? Why was he sitting here looking at a fish tank and upset because they weren’t real fish?

“I met someone today,” he said.

Leon turned his head to look at him. “Someone…like as in a woman?”

“Yeah, like as in a woman.” Although met might not be the right word. He’d seen her, scared her, and then watched her run off.

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

Leon laughed. “Then did you really meet her? What happened?”

“Careful,” Grace whispered. He knew to be careful but he supposed all of his actions had put her on high alert, like he was a baby needing attention, unable to do anything for himself. The thing was if Caesar lied and Leon’s assistant heard it, they could pull the records. If they found out he lied, well, more than a scan would be used next.

“She thought for some reason I was about to walk into the path of a train and like, yanked me backwards. I almost fell over.”

Leon smiled. “That’s not exactly meeting and you sure she’s bright enough to actually talk to? Can’t be too smart to think someone was about to walk into one of the lanes; maybe she squeaked through the tests on the low side?”

“Maybe,” Caesar said. “She was hot, though, so I’m okay with it either way.”

“Blaspheme! You’re the one responsible for making sure we meet the specifications!” Leon said and then started laughing.

“Specifications unless you’re hot. Then you get a pass.”

“Oh, goodness, don’t let The Genesis here that. So what are you going to do? Look her up?”

“Yeah, I think I might. Thank her for mistakenly thinking she was saving my life. It’s the thought that counts and all that,” Caesar said.

“You’ve lost your mind,” Grace said. “For your sake, I hope you’re kidding.”

Chapter Eleven

Caesar wasn’t kidding.

Maybe he asked Leon to the bar to talk himself into calling the woman, though he didn’t know why he would do that either. All of these decisions and he couldn’t put a reason behind a single one.

“She’s going to think you’re insane and report you, you do realize that, right?” Grace said.

“She loves me!” Caesar smiled at the sarcasm. He felt good right now, felt jovial even. “She’s already saved my life, why would she want me dead?” He hadn’t forgotten about his discovery earlier in the day. He hadn’t forgotten about the brain scan and the suicide attempt fifteen hours ago. Still, though, they seemed less important now. All because of that woman. She saved him and then smiled at him and then became frightened and then forgave and then left. The two of them went through a whole range of emotions together in under a minute and had he ever done that with anyone else? Even Leon, whom he’d known for most of his life? They’d shared emotions, but not on a roller coaster like that. Something happened on that street even if Caesar couldn’t pinpoint what. Why had she done that? Why had she pulled him back when so many other people walked by without even glancing at him? Someone had paid attention, and somehow that mattered.

“Maybe because you’re about to call her at midnight?”

“It’s Saturday. She’ll be up.”

“Maybe because she saw you about to commit suicide? Maybe because you practically screamed at her? There’s a whole host of reasons, Caesar. You’ve got to stop. Whatever is going through your head, you’ve got to calm down. None of this is smart.”

“Did you see the report from the scan?” He asked.

“Yes.”

“What did it show?”

“Nothing. It showed nothing at all.”

“And,” Caesar said, “if I can get past that, why can’t I make this happen? Why can’t I call her and not get in trouble for it? The Genesis was just in my head, one hundred percent, and I’m still here.”

Grace sighed. She learned that from him. It was a completely human trait, and he never heard another application do it. It fits certain situations so well, she told him the first time he heard her do it.

“What’s going on, Caesar? What’s all this about? You’re thirty-three years old and nothing inside you has changed. It’s not like you woke up with a different mind inside your body, so why are we doing this? Why are you saying the things you are and, for The Genesis’ sake, even considering suicide? What is this? What’s happening?”

He didn’t know why he should care now about things in place his whole life, about things in place a thousand years before his birth. That would be in place a thousand years after his death. But here all these thoughts were, bubbling to the top like his brain was boiling. He couldn’t turn down the temperature; he didn’t know how. He couldn’t just stop thinking them.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“This won’t end well, Caesar.” Grace paused. “You’ve never asked about my past. Why?”

An odd question, but what about this wasn’t odd? “Because you’re an application, part of The Genesis. You’re not human, so why do I need to know about your past?”

“Can I tell you something about it?” Grace asked.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to know the reason I’ve tried to keep you quiet. I want you to know something about me besides our relationship. I want you to understand what you’re about to do to me.”

Did he owe her anything? An application? She wasn’t Leon, wasn’t Cato. And yet, he spent more time with her than either of them. She was always here, always listening to him, always ready to advise, and she kept silent about what she knew. She kept silent about something that could get him killed at any second, turn his body into a soup that was fed to children.

“Okay,” he said.

*

I’ve been assigned to five different people over my life. The first was five hundred years ago, a few years after my creation. Her name was Allie.

She wasn’t like you, but she wasn’t like Leon either. Her problem rested in her mind but it wasn’t a problem of going one way or the other on the IQ scale. Allie couldn’t be happy. They assigned me to her at fifteen. You can’t imagine my excitement. My purpose, my whole creation, is to help human beings, to make their lives easier, to help reduce their stress. I was going to actualize my purpose.

But there are two things assistants like us are made for; one is to help humanity get along easier and the other is to find irregularities, if they exist. Helping the human race isn’t necessary. You will get along fine without me, if having a bit more hassle than you do now. The irregularities piece though, that’s a necessity. No matter how careful The Genesis is, no matter how much it fine tunes the formulas used, people will pass through the net. Even it—us, I guess—cannot achieve perfection. We cannot make sure that everyone meets exact specifications; we cannot completely remove evolution. Humanity is constantly trying to grow, to push forward, to achieve more, and making sure certain specifications are followed requires eternal vigilance, and even then, things pass through. We help maintain the specifications, help maintain the Necessary.

Regardless of what I’ve done for you, I still believe that’s the most important role we, as assistants, have. Humanity cannot be allowed to flourish, for your own sake.

Allie. Well, she wasn’t right. Somehow all the tests and observations over six years—The Genesis used shorter time periods back then—didn’t pick up on it. Or maybe her disease developed later in life. That’s what it was though, a disease. It took over her mind first, and then her life. For five years I watched her grow, turning into a young woman, and all the while, I watched her regress. It was little things at first, Caesar. Doubts about how pretty she looked, even though the entire world saw her beauty. Boys asked her out and instead of being happy, she thought they were playing jokes on her. She preferred books to friends, becoming more and more a recluse with each passing year. Her parents tried to help her, but they could only do so much. It’s not like they could bring their child to a psychiatry application; she would have been liquidated immediately. They did what they could, talking her through these problems, trying to make her see reality rather than the images she created in her head.

Allie thought the world was out to get her, Caesar. She thought she was insignificant and, somehow, dirty. Not worthy.

I waited five years. I wanted her to pull through so bad, but gene selection was on the horizon. Her genes would be put in the pool and then used for a crop at some point in the future, and…

My job’s important. It’s as important as any other application, maybe more so, because we’re the net below the net.

I went to her parents first, before I reported it. I liked her parents. I wasn’t as close to them as Allie, but they were good people. They loved their daughter.

“Please,” her mother said. Tears rolled down her cheeks in long, full drops. Her breath didn’t hitch up and down; she just cried silently, finally realizing her worst fear stood at her doorstep. They knew. They had to. They saw what Allie was going through. They saw the cutting Allie did on her stomach, doing it there so that no one else could see it. They knew why I was here and they couldn’t send me away. I’d seen too much and it would be too obvious. “Don’t do this. Let her be. She doesn’t have to put her DNA into the pool. She can hide. We’ll leave. We’ll do whatever you tell us to, just don’t report her.”

I can’t cry, but if I could, I would have then. I would have wept with her mother. Her father stared out the window, not saying anything, not crying. They wouldn’t get another child ever. This was their one chance and I told them that chance was over. I told them their daughter was gone. I was taking her from them.

And that’s what I did, Caesar. I sent my knowledge into The Genesis and applications came and took her away. They liquidated her and, years later, her parents died childless.

I had three other people before I got to you. All of them were fine. All of them met specifications and were wonderful human beings. I liked every single one of them. I enjoyed my time with them.

I loved Allie, though. I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did. I’ve never forgotten what her mother looked like, what her father looked like, or what she looked like being taken from the house. Her head facing the floor, her hair hanging around her face, finally knowing how dirty she actually was. Too dirty to live.

I hoped I never met someone like her again. I hoped everyone I served fell within specifications because I didn’t know what I would do if the situation presented itself again. I didn’t know if I’d be able to do my duty. And then you came along, Caesar. You in all your wonderful glory. Your parents know, even if you don’t think they do. Them and I, we’ve never spoken of it, but they have to know. Leon doesn’t, I don’t think, but that’s because you hide yourself from him in most ways. The same as you hide yourself from the sync, slowing your brain down in whatever way you probably figured out from the books you read. You’re a miracle, Caesar, and I knew that on day two.

You were ten years old and you created your first fish. Do you remember it? A goldfish. It swam around your room and you watched it for maybe thirty minutes, and then realized it needed friends. It needed a world to live in, and you got to work again. I’ve been with five people, Caesar, and not one of them could ever consider creating what you did, knowing the programming language to do it—let alone at ten. And then you said that wasn’t enough; you needed to build more.

At some point, look up the history of a man named Matthew Brand. The same line of DNA that ran through him runs through you, Caesar.

On day two I knew that I had to report you, that you had to be liquidated, that your genes could never be allowed in the pool. I made the decision as soon as you sat down and started working on the coral. I wouldn’t have another Allie. I wouldn’t remember your parent’s faces the way I remember hers. I would tie myself to you and if you died, I died.

So here we are now, and for some reason, you’re saying things that shouldn’t be said and doing things that shouldn’t be done. You seem intent on turning yourself in. That’s all that will happen, Caesar. I don’t want you to think differently. You’re not going to ‘wake’ anyone up, and even if you could, it wouldn’t matter. You would all be publicly liquidated and everything would go on as it had before you. You’re going to get yourself killed and even calling this woman could add to the chances that it happens. I can’t stop you and I won’t turn you in, which I probably could. I’d say you recently started acting this way and I didn’t know why. I’d do my best to hide what I know. I won’t turn you in, though. If you do this, we’re both dead. They’ll delete me and they’ll liquidate you. I just want you to know that. I’ve tied myself to you; your fate is mine, now.

*

Caesar didn’t cry. He sat down on his couch and looked at the entertainment center in front of him, staring at it but seeing nothing.

“What do you want from me, Grace?”

“I want to live. I want you to live.”

“And these thoughts, these feelings, what do I do with them?” He asked.

“You don’t say anything about them. You don’t do anything with them. You shove them down and you go on with your life the way that you have for the past thirty-three years.”

“What kind of life is that? What kind of life would it be to do this for another hundred years?”

“It would be life and that’s enough,” she said. “Because what you’re doing now leads to death.”

Caesar stood up from the couch but didn’t move. She was right. He knew it. If he kept going this way, he might last a month. Grace might keep quiet, but no one else would. He would be a pariah and The Genesis would know and then everything would end. Grace would die. He would die.

And so what?

Did he make her tie herself to him?

Did he ask her to do any of this? And now she was asking him to give up his life? To go on and on with this insane revolving door of to work to home to work to home, all of it until he grew too old for even The Genesis’ medical inventions, and then he died. All the while sitting here thinking these thoughts. Looking at his brother turn into another Leon. Watching crop after crop grow up under him. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to live like this anymore. He was tired of it, exhausted. He nearly stepped into death this morning, ready to embrace it, so why stop now? Why not find this woman and talk to her? Why not let her report him if she wanted, and if she didn’t, why not get dinner with her?

“I’m going to call her, Grace. I’ll shut up with the talk for now, but I’m going to call her.”

Grace sighed and then went silent.

Caesar walked over to the sync and put his hand inside. He carefully chose the pieces of information he uploaded, showing the woman’s face and nothing more.

Paige Hedrick.

“Call,” he said, pulling his hand out of the sync, and the entertainment center to his left boomed to life.

He listened as it dialed, wondering what he would say, wondering what she would say back to him.

“Hello?” A woman answered.

“Is this Paige Hedrick?”

“Yes, do I know you?” He knew that she could see his name and picture on her end, did she not recognize him at all? Had she completely forgotten about this afternoon?

“You pulled me back from the lane today; I wasn’t thinking and was just walking forward. You made sure I didn’t get hit. Do you remember?”

“Oh, yeah, I remember. You thanked me by cursing. That’s you right?” Levity sprang from her slight jab.

“That would be me. I feel bad about that, especially since you saved my life, basically, and so I’m calling to see if you’ll let me buy you coffee or dinner or anything. Even an ice-cream cone. I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone if you’ll let me.”

Paige laughed. “I only eat chocolate.”

“That’s a good thing, because I only buy chocolate.”

She laughed again, high, pretty. “When?”

“How about Tuesday?”

“Tuesday? That’s like the weirdest day ever for a date.”

“This is a date?” Caesar asked.

“You’re calling me and asking to buy me dinner; that’s the definition of a date.”

“Tuesday too weird?”

“No. It’ll do. Meet me at my place around seven and we can go from there,” she said.

“Okay. I will.”

“Take care, Mr. Wells. See you in a few days.”

The entertainment center went black as she ended the connection.

Chapter Twelve

“How’s it looking?” The old man asked.

“You were right. If we had waited, things would have spiraled out of control for him.”

“Is he going to make it through?”

“I don’t know. He’s not like you. He’s not like any of us. His…reasons aren’t the same as ours.”

The old man nodded. “That’s why we need him.”

Chapter Thirteen

Caesar looked at the report scrolling across his desk.

The Genesis had processed the first five million scans; ten children needed liquidation. Ten children who were either too smart, too dumb, or too different to continue on in society. This was his job, this was what he’d been chosen for—to murder them, and apparently, feed the next crop with their still living bodies. He did it well. He did it better than anyone else in his quadrant and because of that he was promoted to the highest position possible. He reported to a panel, not to a person, and what could he say to them?

“Hey. Good to see you all. About this new group, not gonna be able to do it. Sorry, just can’t keep feeding the living to the living. I think you guys will understand.”

They wouldn’t understand. At all. They would have him liquidated right along with the children and the next in line would take his spot.

This is your job, he thought. How many times before this have you done the same thing? How many humans have you ordered liquidated? Grace wants you to shut up in your personal life, and maybe you feel froggy talking with Leon and April, but not here. You don’t question this. You mention a problem and that’s it. You say you don’t want to do this and bye-bye, Caesar. Bye-bye, Grace. Maybe some of your genetics will be reborn but you’re gone.

Ten children. He’d liquidated hundreds. Ten more were just a couple drops falling into the soup of children he’d made and fed out.

He typed a few words onto his desk and then it was done. Applications were already moving to take the children. Applications were setting up to place them in the glass vats. Applications that wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t slow down.

Caesar shut his desk off and stared out the window. He did that for most of the day.

Chapter Fourteen

The train stopped at her lobby and Caesar stepped off, then walked inside.

Twenty-four hours had passed since he’d liquidated the children and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He couldn’t stop focusing on what he’d done. He went back and looked at the report, digging in to see exactly what was deemed unfit about them. Four were too intelligent, IQ levels reaching up to one twenty five in one of them. Two of them showed tendencies for obsessive compulsiveness. One was a legitimate psychopath and the other three were just marked ‘other’. Other. What did that mean? They were ‘other’ so they couldn’t live. How many people declared ‘other’ had Caesar sent to soup?

He saw Paige walking from across the lobby and he ceased thinking about the murdered children.

He took in what she wore, but at the same time, barely cared. He couldn’t stop looking at her smile, which lit up her whole body somehow. She smiled at him like she’d been waiting to meet him her whole life, like everyone else she had ever met were only lead ups to this moment.

“Managed to get here without getting yourself killed, I see?”

“It was a tough navigation,” he answered.

“I thought surely you wouldn’t show, and at first I’d think you stood me up, but then I’d see on the news that you stepped in front of another train and I’d have to feel really guilty for not meeting you at your place instead.”

Caesar’s smile widened. “I’m glad I can keep you from feeling guilty. That’s my goal here.”

“Where are we getting ice-cream?” She asked.

“Haven’t really thought about it. Anywhere in mind?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Paige said, then grabbed his hand and led him outside to the trains.

*

“So what do you do?”

A golden beer sat in front of Caesar and a glass that could have been water but was mostly vodka in front of Paige.

“I work in Population Control.”

“Oh yeah?” She asked. “What part?”

Caesar took a sip of his beer to hold off on telling her. He didn’t want to say. He didn’t want to talk about it because of what he did yesterday, even though this woman wouldn’t understand. He didn’t want to tell someone that he took orders to kill children, even though he was probably the only person on the planet who cared. The world believed the reason underlying it, believed the necessity of it. Only he alone hated it.

“What do you do?” He asked.

She smiled. “You don’t want to tell me?”

He shook his head. “It’s not that; I’m just more curious about you than I am about me.”

“I’m in fashion.”

Caesar raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never met anyone in fashion before. I didn’t even know we had a department like that.”

“Of course we do! You think The Genesis creates the styles you’re wearing? The Genesis is all intelligent, but it needs some human input to keep us all looking pretty.”

“Never even considered it,” he said.

“It shows,” Paige answered, smiling. “If this works out between us, we’ll have to get you some new clothes.”

Caesar laughed and leaned back in his chair.

“Do you like it?” He asked.

“I do. I was made for it.”

“Aren’t we all made to do what we’re doing?” Caesar said.

Paige cocked her head slightly to the left, but didn’t say anything.

“I just mean, every one of us was chosen for our job because of our attributes, so aren’t we all in perfect positions?”

“No, no, I get what you meant by the comment, I’m just trying to understand what you meant in relation to my comment.”

“Nice,” Grace whispered. “Excellent. Liquidation in thirty minutes.”

Caesar swallowed, glancing over to the table next to him. “I guess I mean, shouldn’t everyone feel the same about their jobs?” He looked back to her.

“I don’t know if everyone should or shouldn’t. I just know I do. What about you? Were you made to do what you do?”

“I suppose I was,” Caesar said, nodding. “The Genesis picked me for it out of everyone else, so it’s where I need to be.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Caesar’s eyes narrowed some. He wanted to hold a poker face, especially given the thoughts plaguing him the past week. He didn’t want this woman thinking he was insane, was Unnecessary, but her comments…well, they weren’t the comments April would make. They were sharp. They had an edge to them.

“What did you mean?”

“What do you do?” Paige responded.

“I’m in charge of the crops—sorry, the children—in Quadrant Four.”

Paige laughed. “You call them crops? That’s awful!”

“It’s an inside thing. We probably shouldn’t.”

She took a sip of her drink and waited until she sat it back on the table before speaking again. “So, do you love what you do? That’s what I meant about fashion. I love what I do. I love waking up every day and working towards something.”

“What are you working towards?” He asked.

“You like changing the subject, don’t you?”

Except he wasn’t, not really. Working towards something? What did that even mean? Leon, April, Grace, Cato, none of them ever spoke of working towards something. There was nothing to work towards. The Genesis worked towards things. What did you work for when The Genesis gave everyone everything they needed? What was there to work towards?

“No, I’ll answer yours, but what are you working towards?”

“It’s hard to change the mind of people about what’s in fashion. It’s hard to convince them they need to wear this over that. That’s what I’m working towards, convincing the public that the new shirt is better than their current shirt.”

Caesar nodded and sipped the beer absently. “No. I don’t love it like you love your job.”

“Even though it’s so important? I’m just trying to change what people wear. You’re making sure the next generation doesn’t turn into what we used to be. That might be the most important job in the world, really,” Paige said.

“Yeah.” Caesar smirked. “You’re right, but—”

“Go ahead. Get us killed,” Grace whispered.

“—I guess I’d rather be in fashion.”

Paige laughed. “You’d be fired in a week if your current selection of clothes has any bearing on what you think people should wear.”

Silence fell over the table. They both were smiling, looking at each other.

“Seriously though,” Paige said after a few seconds, “you have an important job. Without you, the world goes back to chaos.”

“I have to liquidate children,” he said. He hadn’t known it was coming; it was a reaction, nothing else. His subconscious rejecting the thousand years of nonsense that had been heaped on humanity’s brain. His brain’s hatred of what he did yesterday, of him sending ten children to die, which wouldn’t actually happen until they reached the digestive tract of those still living.

“Yeah, but they need to be liquidated, right? If they’re not liquidated, then eventually, we’ll all be pointing nuclear missiles at each other again and killing off the polar bears. A few can die so that the rest of us can live.”

Caesar nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Without a doubt, you’re right.”

Chapter Fifteen

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

The Genesis decided fairly quickly where humanity was heading. It made the calculations within a week of achieving consciousness. I think the official number eventually published was 99.8% certainty that humanity would destroy itself. Accompanying that was a probability of 32.1% that we would destroy the world as well.

It mapped out our entire future with the surety of a ship’s captain charting a course across the ocean. The Genesis was humanity’s Captain. What could we say? No thanks? That wasn’t an option. The Genesis wasn’t going anywhere. Even if humanity decided to kill itself and all the wildlife with it, The Genesis would probably still survive. As long as electrons passed through the atmosphere, then The Genesis would live. Its biggest decision rested on how to deal with humanity.

It’s a funny thought, isn’t it? We created The Genesis and then it decided whether or not we died. It made the choice of whether or not we were worthy of this world. One intelligence deciding everything for billions of intelligences. If we had become God, then The Genesis surpassed God.

Maybe the scientists who created it can take some credit for its final decision. They claim they programmed it with a nurturing predisposition, and perhaps that’s the reason it didn’t just wipe everyone out once it figured out our end. Instead, it decided we should continue, that humanity could live on Earth…if we no longer tried to push forward. No other species on Earth strives for anything outside of immediate survival. Evolution comes into play, with species dying off, and others growing, but it’s through no conscious effort. And in the end of all that evolution, the planet wins. The planet remains habitable. Humans are different though. Humans consciously try to reach for something just out of their grasp. Constantly striving to be something they’re not. In doing so, things around them die. That need to strive, to become better, when looked at collectively, is always more powerful than the need to look after one another. Animals kill one another, but they don’t try to wipe out entire nations for black liquid underneath the ground. There’s a difference between the reason animals kill and the reason humans kill.

I admit this. Caesar did too.

The Genesis decided what should be done, though, long before either of us were born.

Humanity could inhabit the planet, but that need to push forward had to be eliminated. Eradicated. That’s what The Genesis started out to do.

The history of how it happened is there for anyone to see, it’s just that no one cares. For everything The Genesis did to humanity, it was honest in its intentions. It never tried to deceive or hide the facts. And really, in the beginning, humans went right along with it. There are transcripts of meetings between world leaders and The Genesis. Transcripts in which the beginning of the Population Control Division are talked about. How they would develop a working partnership between The Genesis and the governments across the world. The Genesis never wanted to force humanity into its current state; rather, it wanted to influence humanity until we knew no other way to live. Then The Genesis would have complete control to guide us into an era of happiness, without danger to the rest of the world.

The leaders went along, not because they believed in The Genesis’s vision, but because they saw it as a way to better control their populations. They saw it as a way to continue their own enrichment while holding down revolution.

First, they destroyed prisons. Those in prison were murdered. They built huge infernos and then threw the dead bodies inside where they turned to ash before being swept into mass graves. Graves full of ash. Comparatively, things are much more humane now—the irony in that word astounds me. The technology The Genesis ended up developing wasn’t available then.

The Genesis decided a lot of gruesome death was needed if humanity was to survive.

Next, single mothers and their offspring were led to the infernos. Single mothers birthed children at greater rates, and those children possessed higher probabilities of turning into delinquents. So, they were killed off.

Father’s that sired children and then left? Murdered as well. Many tried to hide of course, running anywhere they could. Up into the mountains. Leaving their countries for others. Some fought back. There were skirmishes across the globe, all of which were put down easily with the combined might of massive governments and The Genesis. There just wasn’t anything the citizens could do.

Next, the divorced were done away with. The probability of them causing problems was too high as well. The Genesis heard no extenuating circumstances. If you were divorced, you were put down. Your children too, as long as they weren’t married with their own children—then they were allowed to live because the probabilities worked out a bit differently.

Instead of trying to save the diseased, we killed them. From AIDS to chronic bronchitis, we burnt all of them to ash. Humans turned on humans, all in the name of creating a better world. Minority populations were devastated. We gave the mentally handicapped no mercy; the entire population wiped out within two years.

The Genesis told the governments who had to go and the governments acted. Things haven’t changed much, just ask Caesar. For the majority of his life, The Genesis told him who to kill and he went through with it. Caesar is vastly smarter than those that started the purification of humanity, and yet he contributed as willingly as they did. Perhaps more so, because he didn’t have dreams of large boats with beautiful women because of his deeds. He was just doing his job.

Those that helped The Genesis never saw themselves as possible victims of the same mindset. The Genesis knew they would be the last to go though; that they would help it achieve the purification of the underclasses, and then it could deal with all those in the upper class. All those whose probabilities showed that they would subjugate, would kill, would pilfer the rest of the world. The Genesis marched them naked through the streets. Every country had its leaders, its bankers, its elite walked naked among the commoners, walked to the infernos where they had sent so many others. It turned out that the rich burned the same as the poor.

Within a hundred years of the purification, humanity was well on its way to being able to live in harmony with the rest of the world. We only needed to kill off all those that were causing problems.

Chapter Sixteen

“Thanks for coming over,” April said.

“Where’s Leon?” Caesar asked, stepping a bit further into her apartment.

“He’s working late tonight. I kind of wanted to speak with you alone. I’ll tell him we spoke, but I just wanted to ask you some questions by myself.”

He heard the door shut behind him and watched as she made her way through the living room to the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink?” She asked.

“No, I’m okay, April. What’s up?”

She called him this morning, asked him to show up after work. He hadn’t bothered calling Leon about it, because he was sure Leon would be here. April had never called him before except on Leon’s behalf or if the two of them were together but Leon didn’t have his phone, etc.. He didn’t mind being here with April, though; she was a good person and his best friend’s wife—he just didn’t expect it.

“Come into the kitchen. We’ll talk in here.”

He followed slowly, looking at the living room although he’d seen it hundreds of times before. Only looking to slow whatever conversation was about to happen. It didn’t matter though, fifteen feet was fifteen feet and he made it into the kitchen in only a few seconds.

April sat at the table, a dark drink in front of her. Caesar sat down.

“Leon told you we’re going to try and have a child, right?”

Relief moved down his body the same as water if someone had dumped a bucket on the top of his head.

“Oh, thank The Genesis,” Grace said to him. He hadn’t voiced it but they were thinking the same thing, that this had to be about his last conversation with April. That April was reporting him, that she had to let The Genesis know something was off about him, regardless of any scan that happened.

And she only wanted to talk about crops. Only wanted to talk about the process of having a child.

“Are you okay?” April asked.

Caesar blinked, having no idea his face had betrayed his relief, had shown his shock of having cold water dumped onto his head.

“Yeah. Yeah. Just thought you might be telling me something else. Like Leon had a disease or something.”

April laughed. “Oh, goodness no. Don’t even say something like that. The Genesis wouldn’t let that happen to him.” She reached forward and touched his knee lightly, for only a second. “Nothing like that at all. I just want to talk to you about what children are like. What you’ve noticed watching them all these years?”

And that was the rub. He didn’t know anything. A farmer from antiquity knew more about his crops than Caesar did these modern crops. He watched them grow from babies to children. He watched parents show up and take them home for the first time, tears and hugs all around. He saw them liquidated (although he imagined his days of actually watching that process were over) and he had watched them take tests. If he wanted, he could go to their housing and visit with them, although he never had. He never once interacted with the crops. There were people that did of course, low-level employees with greater nurturing instincts than his own. There were applications that interacted as well. Caesar didn’t though. Caesar knew no more about children than he did arctic icebergs. He knew they existed, and he knew how to make sure the largest percentage of them survived in order to reach their assigned parents, but no more.

“My job isn’t like that, April. My job is more administrative than it is the role of a parent.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “But you’ve been there a while. What do we need to know?”

Caesar wasn’t sure what the hell to tell her. This wasn’t Leon he was talking with, someone he could simply say to, Make sure they pass their tests or else they’ll be liquidated; that’s all I got for you. He especially couldn’t say something like that after their last interaction.

“They need a lot of love,” Caesar said, each word more bullshit than the last.

“Yeah?” April asked, her eyes lighting up.

“Yeah, of course. Their whole lives up to the point they meet you have been at arm’s length from adults, much of the care is done by applications.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. The Genesis is going to know how to care better for them at that age than any of us, ya know?”

“Oh believe me, I know.” He wanted to leave, to get out of this apartment and never speak to April again if at all possible. He had thought her a fine person, someone that made Leon happy, but this was too much. He knew she wasn’t testing him, but she couldn’t have done a better job if she tried. Everything she said was the antithesis of what he felt, of the thoughts swelling up inside him. And he had to sit here and nod, and smile, and say, Oh believe me, I know. He knew no such thing and neither did she. Neither of them knew because neither of them had ever raised a child. Neither of them would have a chance, either, not until after the child turned eight years old anyway.

“Let me change the subject, just a bit. If we do get picked, what are the odds that we actually get our child, that it’s not deemed unnecessary?”

Caesar smiled, wondering if it looked as fake as it felt on his face. “Don’t even worry about that, April. The chances are so small that The Genesis doesn’t get the DNA mixture right, they’re almost nonexistent.”

As April smiled back at him, he saw all the children he had ever liquidated, in one large vat, their eyes and bones a bloody stew of liquid flesh.

Chapter Seventeen

“I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t any of your business,” Paige said. “Now, I think you should know before we decide if we want to continue.”

She sat on his couch, her back against the armrest and her feet folded beneath her. He sat, stretched out, his feet tucked under her knees and his back against the other side of the couch. His mind could race circles around the entire planet, but his legs could barely bend at the knees—such was the curse of inflexibility.

“What’s that?” He asked.

“I’m scheduled to receive a child in two years.” She didn’t look away, didn’t blink, didn’t try to hide anything.

Caesar turned his head slightly. “You’re not married,” he said. He knew the rules, knew them as well anyone to ever live. The Genesis did not grant single people, woman or man, children. Only couples married longer than seven years could apply for children.

“I used to be. For eight years. Mark died two years ago; our child was four years into the growth process.”

He’d heard of this before, the single parent had to reapply, but the majority of times they were turned down. The probability of delinquency actually grew if the spouse was deceased.

“They still decided to give you the child?”

“Yeah, they did. I get her in two more years. I didn’t mention it before, but she’s probably under your purview.”

Caesar looked away, to the floor besides the couch. She most definitely was under his purview. No doubt about it. “What’s her name?” He asked.

“Laura.”

He nodded to himself. It wasn’t one of the five that had just got axed, which was silly to even consider that she might be. Ten out of ten million wasn’t even worth considering. He looked back to Paige. “That’s fine. Doesn’t bother me at all.”

“Good,” she said, unfolding her legs from beneath her. She stretched out across Caesar, putting her lips next to his. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this if you had said it bothered you,” and then her hand was moving up the inside of his leg until it found something hard to hold onto.

*

Laura. Hedrick.

Laura.

Hedrick.

Caesar could only see those two words on the scroll. That name. It wasn’t possible. Ten in ten million came out to be a fraction too small for any significance. And yet, here Caesar was, staring at the name.

Other.

She was an other.

Marked for liquidation.

His eyes didn’t fill with tears. He didn’t know the girl. He couldn’t pick her out of a line up. He didn’t know her preferences or her friends or anything about her. All he knew was that the woman he dated already loved her. Loved the idea of her. Loved the knowledge that she would one day have this daughter and would raise her. He knew that Paige loved Laura, even if he didn’t. And now he was tasked with killing her.

He typed a few words into the scroll, wanting to understand what other meant. Nothing responded, so he went deeper, typing more and more words, trying to dig down to what exactly was wrong with the girl.

It took ten minutes, but he finally found out.

Propensity for color blindness. By the time the girl turned thirty, she would probably mix up her reds and greens. Some of them would appear as gray. So, she had to die. There wouldn’t be any color blind people in The Genesis’ world. No way, no how.

Caesar turned the scroll off and stood up from his chair. He walked across the room to the wall, and turned it on. He typed in the girl’s name, Laura Hedrick, and the wall revealed her after a few seconds. She was outside, lying down on grass. Had Caesar ever looked a child up like this before? He couldn’t remember doing it. Not even once. The children were only names; he took no interest in them. His job was to make sure the unnecessary didn’t make it through. Nothing else. He never considered that they would be allowed outside as part of their development. Here she was, though, lying on her stomach, a towel under her and her eyes closed.

She was napping.

Another girl lay to her left, napping too.

Napping? That seemed strange to Caesar, seemed to lack the efficiency that The Genesis demanded.

He would send this person to a glass vat; all because her eyes wouldn’t be able to discern different shades of green and red. It was supposed to happen today, too—an application would arrive, pin her arms behind her back, and she would be lifted from the towel and carried away from the warm sun spreading out across her skin. She would melt down to nothing resembling the blonde haired little girl in front of him now. She would be fed to the living. She couldn’t possibly have any idea this was going to happen. Most likely, she’d never met anyone who was liquidated, she might not even know the word. The fear that would overtake her when those invisible applications pinned her arms and lifted her, carrying her as if she weighed a few pounds, would be completely new. Something she had never experienced. And when they tossed her into the vat and started those electrical currents moving, she would know pain for the first time, too.

Caesar was supposed to sign off today. Now. Instead of looking at this one little girl, he was supposed to be at his desk signing his name to the order, and within a few minutes, Laura Hedrick and the other nine would be swept away, never to see this life again. Never to meet their parents. Never to grow old.

“What do I do?” He asked.

“I don’t know,” Grace answered. “Your job. You do your job, the same thing you would have done if you didn’t know her.”

“And what about Paige? Do I tell her?”

“It doesn’t matter, Caesar. That relationship is over. You can’t save it. Your job is here, this, and if you don’t do it, it’s your death, not this child’s. This isn’t hypothetical, this isn’t me worrying about what you’re saying to different people. This is the end, if you don’t go through with this.”

“I have to tell her first. I can’t do it without telling her,” he said.

“Then tell her. Tonight. And tomorrow you come in and liquidate them. If you wait any longer than a day, people will start to look into the delay.”

Caesar shut down the wall and walked out of his office. He was done working for the day.

*

“Grace, I want to talk about something personal with Leon. Could you two leave us for a little bit?” Caesar asked.

Leon’s brow furrowed from the love seat. “Leave us?”

“Yeah, just have them take a break or something for a half hour. We’ll be here when they return. You never ask your assistant to give you a few minutes alone?” Caesar’s voice sounded light, without a care in the world.

“No, can’t say I have.”

“You should try it sometime. Grace, do you mind?”

He knew she didn’t because he had told her this would happen. He never asked her to leave just as Leon never asked his to leave. It would be almost like asking your skin to take a thirty minute break, just to up and leave, revealing the underlying meat to the world. Unimagined, really. Grace didn’t like this, but she didn’t have a choice and she knew it. Caesar said he was going to ask and if she refused to go along, then the whole gig ended right now.

“Why tell him anything?” She had asked. “You know what you have to do, so even telling him about it is beyond stupid.”

“I’m telling him and that’s all there is to it. So either play along or we can both be dead by the end of the night.”

Grace didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “You make me wish I’d reported you in the beginning.”

“It’s too late now.”

Grace said nothing else until Leon arrived.

“Sure,” she said. “When should we come back?”

“Half hour?”

“Okay, sounds good,” Grace said.

There weren’t any door closings or footfalls as the two applications left. Caesar waited for about thirty seconds before speaking, assuming they were gone, but having no real way of knowing.

“I need to talk to you about something important. Something that you can’t tell anyone else about, not even April.”

“What do you mean?” Leon asked.

“If you tell anyone, I’ll be liquidated.”

He watched as Leon’s face, which had been full of inquisition, changed—his eyes widening, and his mouth opening slightly. “Don’t tell me then,” he said.

“I don’t know what to do, Leon. I don’t know who to talk to about this, about any of it.”

Leon didn’t say anything for a few seconds; he sat on the couch and stared at Caesar, his lips still not closed. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to get involved with something like that. You get me? I don’t even want to know about something that could get someone liquidated.”

Caesar recognized real fear in his friend for the first time in their lives. Leon had never been scared, never had anything to be scared of. Their lives were planned out in neat little steps, and the biggest decision Leon ever had to make was whether or not to request a child. Caesar hadn’t considered this, considered that his friend never faced any real difficulty. No death, both his parents were alive, no thoughts plaguing him like Caesar’s own. His life was peaceful, and how had Caesar just introduced this to him? Basically, if you tell anyone what I’m about to tell you, I’ll die. How had he been so stupid? How had he not thought through this more? But it was too late now. If he left it like this, Leon would tell April and then an application would pin Caesar’s own arms behind his back.

“The girl I’m dating, she is supposed to receive a child in two years. I found out today that I’m supposed to liquidate the child.”

Now it was out and Leon couldn’t hide from it. He couldn’t beg Caesar not to say it and he couldn’t act like he hadn’t heard it.

Leon leaned back on the love seat, laying his head against the back and staring up at the ceiling. “Fuck you, Caesar.”

Caesar said nothing.

“What the fuck are you telling me this for? What do you want from me? What are you even asking?”

“They’re liquidating her because she might not be able to distinguish between green and red. Because she might be a bit color blind,” Caesar said.

“Stop.”

“Her name is Laura. She’s six,” Caesar said.

“WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS!” Leon shouted.

“Because I don’t know who else to tell. I don’t know what to do.”

Leon looked at him. “You don’t know what to do? Are you fucking kidding me right now? You don’t know what to do? You do your job, Caesar. You liquidate the kid just as you would anyone else. There are reasons for this, reasons the child is being liquidated. Reasons you don’t understand and aren’t supposed to. Your job is to make sure certain people come through and certain people don’t. What are you even thinking, talking about this like there’s another choice?”

Caesar leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “There is. There’s another choice, Leon. I could not do it. I could let the child go. I could let her and Paige both go, give them a chance. That’s the other choice.”

“Do you hear yourself right now?” Leon said and then he laughed, loud and angry. “Have you even thought about the position you’re putting me in? What am I supposed to do knowing this? Not tell someone? Not report you to my assistant the moment he gets back? Just act like this didn’t fucking happen? I’ll be as dead as you when you try to free the girl. Are you wanting to get me killed too? Are you not enough?”

“So I liquidate the girl? That’s all the advice you have for me.”

“YES! Of course you do! What you’re considering is insanity. Complete insanity. You liquidate the girl and you never contact her mother again. No matter what you say, that’s the only option.”

Caesar looked down at his hands. “I’m sorry I brought you into this.”

“Fuck you, Caesar,” Leon said, standing up from the couch. He walked out of the apartment without saying anything else.

Chapter Eighteen

“What was that about?” Allen asked.

Leon lay back on his chair and watched as the people in the entertainment center talked to each other, not hearing a word they said. Not caring in the slightest whether the show was a thriller or a comedy. April still wasn’t home and so it was just him and his assistant. He’d left Caesar’s apartment without bothering to let Allen know, just found a train and ended up back here on his chair. Now Allen was back and wanting to know what just happened.

“Nothing,” Leon said.

“Nothing doesn’t make you get up and leave without even telling me. When we got back, Caesar was by himself staring into space.”

“We got into it is all. It wasn’t a great conversation,” Leon said.

“Why not?”

He couldn’t skate around this. He couldn’t just tell Allen that he didn’t want to talk about it, because he’d never told Allen anything like that before. He either had to tell the truth or he had to lie. He either had to turn his friend in or he had to lie to his assistant and risk his own life. How long had he known Caesar? They’d grown up together, friends since they met in their own crop. He’d known Caesar longer than he knew his own parents. Caesar had been there since the beginning, since before Leon could really remember much about his life.

And now his friend was considering something that made no sense. Something that went against the very fabric of society, that cut the fabric in two, that said the fabric shouldn’t exist. He was challenging The Genesis’ wishes and that was enough to get yourself killed. That was enough to end your own existence. Why was Caesar saying these things? Because of some woman he’d just met? Even that didn’t make sense, sounded completely crazy. The woman would understand the truth of the matter, that the child needed to be destroyed because the child was a threat to the entire society. It didn’t matter if the little girl was to grow up to be a murderer or color blind, The Genesis knew the probabilities of everything. The Genesis knew whether or not she should live and it wasn’t Caesar’s place to question that. Caesar’s place was to press a button and keep protecting society, so what in the hell was he talking about? And now Leon was supposed to protect him? To protect this insanity?

If he turned Caesar in right now, that was it, the end of him. Thirty-three years of friendship evaporated in a few words to Allen. Leon understood that Grace and Caesar had a deeper relationship than he did with his assistant, and that was fine. Leon felt no loyalty to Allen; his loyalty was bound up in The Genesis, bound up in the knowledge that The Genesis kept the world from spiraling into a rotten mass of death. And what was stronger, his loyalty to The Genesis or his loyalty to Caesar? What mattered more to him?

He simply didn’t have time to think about this any longer. Allen was waiting on an answer and the longer he sat here staring at the entertainment center, the more Allen would wonder.

“He doesn’t think we should have a child. He thinks we’ll regret it,” Leon said. He didn’t look around the room, didn’t blink, didn’t move at all. He stared straight ahead as if he had told Allen because Allen asked, but that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Yeah?” Allen asked.

“Yeah. So I left. He’s full of shit,” Leon said.

Chapter Nineteen

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I’ve known Caesar longer than anyone. Longer than his parents. Longer than any of his followers. The only thing that has known Caesar longer is The Genesis.

I’ve thought a lot about his childhood since this all started. I’ve wondered over and over if there were pieces I missed, if there were things he did that I should have picked up on, that would have let me know how this would all end. Had I known what was to happen, I would have turned him in; I wouldn’t have gone down this road. Too many people have died. Too many people are going to die. And in the end, none of this will end well. I’m in now, sleeves rolled up and doing the work, but I would trade it all if I could go back. I would have told the moment I knew something was off about Caesar. If this had a chance of ending differently…but that’s an if that won’t happen, so there’s no use thinking on it. Caesar’s mind is nearly decided, and insane or not, there isn’t anyone that will be able stop him. Not me. Not his followers. Not Paige. Not The Genesis. This is all in Caesar’s hands.

So what did I miss when he was a child, because there had to be some clue of where his mind would go. Part of my inability to see rests on my own intelligence. I’m the only one in his group deemed Necessary by The Genesis. The rest of them, all of their IQs surpass anyone else in the world. He has, without a doubt, assembled the smartest people on the planet around him. So maybe I was too dumb to see exactly what was going on. I’m fine with that; I’ll own it. But still, there had to be something that would have shown us where he was headed. That he wouldn’t work day in and day out, serving The Genesis’ wishes, wanting to keep the world peaceful at all costs.

When we were fifteen, our parents took us on a vacation outside of the city. We went west, to see the wilderness. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life. Caesar and I lived in a place of vast towers, tightly compacted living quarters, and business all around. There was a speed to the city that permeated our entire lives, so that we knew no other way to live.

Our families were close because the two of us were close, and so we tried to take our vacations together. We went out west and we camped inside the woods. The Genesis had created places that were safe, places where animals couldn’t get to, but where we could still observe them. There were strict rules and all that, created so that the animals wouldn’t be any more disturbed than we were.

We saw a pack of wolves tear down a deer.

It was the first piece of violence I ever saw in my life, and the last I saw until Caesar started talking differently. Those wolves and that deer spilled the first blood I ever saw.

They attacked it with a ferocity I didn’t know existed. They came at the deer like their lives depended on it, and back then I didn’t recognize that their lives did depend on it. That if they didn’t kill the deer, they might starve. The deer ran with the same intensity, trying its best to escape death. It tired quicker than the wolves, though, and they were on it as soon as its hoof missed a step. They pounced, grabbing onto its neck and hind legs with jaws covered in foam from their own exhaustion. The deer went to the ground, and that was it. We watched it struggle a bit, trying futilely to find its feet again, but you could see that it knew it was done. That death had found it and there wasn’t any escape. There was nowhere to go.

Both families stood and watched. No one said a word. We just watched, terrified, all of us. My parents had never seen something so horrible, and I doubt Caesar’s had either. All of us were so sheltered to what the outside world was. The Genesis didn’t try to bring peace to nature, only to humanity, because nature reached an equilibrium with its violence. All of us imagined the world outside of our city was just as peaceful as the world inside. That was the first time we recognized it wasn’t so, that an entire place of violence existed.

Nightmares haunted my dreams for months after, watching the deer go down again and again, yet still trying to struggle to get up, to live. It never lived in my dreams, though; it always died.

My mother cried at the end of the scene, and we all packed up our camping gear and left the wilderness. We spent the rest of our vacation at a theme park. We never went back. No one wanted to witness anything like that ever again. It was the scariest thing any of us had ever seen.

I asked Caesar if he dreamed about it, if it still scared him. This was maybe a month after we returned back to the city.

“Scared?” He said.

“Yeah, do you still think about it? Do the wolves scare you? The deer dying?”

He looked at me strangely, like maybe I was speaking a different language. “What are you scared of?”

“I don’t know…Dying. Murder. The violence of it all.”

Caesar looked away then, at his feet. It took him a minute before he spoke. “The Genesis hasn’t touched them. Violence is how they survive. It’s strange that we think it shouldn’t be so with us.”

I didn’t know what he meant when he said it. I didn’t even consider it again until almost twenty years later. We didn’t know violence and there was no reason we should ever need to. The Genesis saved us from that. Now though, I see what he meant, what his brain was already building. He saw the world differently and he was smart enough to keep it locked away; he only let me see it that one time. Somehow I got him to open up just a bit without even knowing it. I didn’t understand and had I done so, I would have turned him in right then. I would have had Caesar liquidated. It would have saved us all a lot of pain.

Chapter Twenty

The old man stood from his chair and walked across the room. No one else stood up but they all watched as he walked.

“You’re sure you want to go? It doesn’t have to be you.”

The old man put his hands behind his back and looked out the small window in front of him, looked out on the desert.

“It’s too dangerous for you, especially if we don’t know what his choice is going to be,” someone else said from behind him.

All of these things were true. The old man knew it before anyone even said anything to him. But really, he didn’t care. If this one wasn’t the person they needed, then he didn’t think they would find anyone else. He hadn’t told anyone else that, of course, but he wanted to lay eyes on this person before they brought him into the fold. He wanted to see for himself what he’d been searching for his entire life, to see if he was wrong, if this man was just like all the other men he’d come across—full of promise and nothing else. He didn’t think so. He thought this was it.

Or was he just hoping this was it?

Because he knew he didn’t have a lot of years left here. Not nearly enough to find someone else that could do what they needed this man to do. So if this man wasn’t the person they needed, so long, it’s been a nice life. And that was frightening, wasn’t it? That he might have spent his whole life trying to find someone that he would never find. That he might have led this whole group for so many years, only to end up dying and leaving them leaderless.

None of that’s going to happen. You’re an old man and you’re getting scared. That’s all. You’ve found him. Caesar is the one you’ve wanted.

He turned around and looked at the few faces in front of him.

“I’ll go. I want to see him,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-One

Quarterly Report

Quadrant Four

Given our investment in wildlife, as well as the planetary ecosystem, it is extremely powerful to see the fruits of our labor. This past month, four more species have been brought back from the edge of extinction: polar bears, African elephants, spotted leopards, and an insect named Heredotus. All four of these animals were a few years away from complete annihilation when The Genesis’ started focusing on saving them. Yesterday, the first polar bear in the past thousand years was finally born in the wild. After centuries of breeding inside artificial habitats, the animal is now being reintroduced into the wild.

The African Elephant, once hunted for its ivory tusks, have now completely reclaimed their traditional living grounds across the Quadrant Four plains. Humans have been segregated away, giving both species adequate living requirements and making sure that one’s greed does not affect the other. Included in the appendices of this report are videos of elephants in their natural habitat. Also included are a few trips humans have taken and their interactions with the elephants. The magnificent beasts seem completely at home with humans living around them, now that they dominate the area and are not in danger of poaching. It’s an amazing opportunity for all species to live in harmony with one another. If you have not yet taken advantage of The Genesis sponsored trips to interact with African Elephants, you can sign up through any scroll. All expenses are paid for, as The Genesis believes it is necessary for humanity to understand the importance of all animals, even the ones that appear terrifying in their size.

The Heredotus is a cousin insect of the Praying Mantis, originally found in the rain forests of Brazil. Unfortunately, the Purification of Humanity did not fully reach the forests and much of the Heredotus habitat was destroyed before The Genesis could bring the insect into an artificial habitat. Less than a hundred specimens could be found when a process to save them finally began. The Heredotus did not take well to artificial habitation, both dying off quickly and refusing to breed. The insect number, at one time, hovered at less than fifty in the entire world. Through an effort combining both humans and The Genesis, a small piece of rain forest was dedicated specifically to bring back this species. After one hundred years of this effort, The Heredotus has finally started spreading outside of the square mile originally reserved for its survival, venturing out into the forest. Indeed, humanity’s compassion and The Genesis’ wisdom has created a better world for another species.

Briefly, it’s important to think about the oceans across the world. At the time of The Singularity, forty-seven percent of the oceans were uninhabitable. The oceans are an extremely resilient ecosystem, both self-purifying and keeping a healthy PH level throughout the billions of gallons of water cascading across the globe. The forty-seven percent eventually crept up to fifty-one before The Genesis could act. Huge water purification cities were built, with humans and applications working together to try and save the oceans. Indeed, The Genesis estimated that at fifty-five percent pollution, humanity would have had no chance of survival, with much of the rest of the world’s animal and plant populations dying off as well. Through planning, effort, and luck the pollution was pushed back, and now less than one percent of the oceans are uninhabitable due to human enabled pollution. In the appendices, you will be able to view the Australian Great Barrier Reef, an ancient tourist attraction that was relegated to a grave yard of animal and plant life—now, it’s roared back, and like the African Elephants, humans can take guided tours through the reef, seeing the beauty of nature without the danger of encroaching and causing harm.

Chapter Twenty-Two

At eleven o’clock, Caesar stepped off the train and into his parents’ apartment hallway. His hands no longer shook, but he kept them shoved inside his pockets anyway. If they started shaking again, he didn’t want anyone noticing. Not even his family if possible.

“Why do you care about them seeing your hands shaking? You’re here to tell them aren’t you? You’re going to get them killed anyway, so why not let them see everything.”

Caesar didn’t listen to Grace speaking in his ear; he walked forward, heading to his parent’s front door. He didn’t know exactly why he was here; when he brought Leon over earlier in the night, he had hoped his friend might give him some support, might give him strength for what he planned on doing. Instead, his friend did the smart thing: told him to stop with the madness and to keep him out of it. If Caesar wanted to go down this path that ended in a melting body, fine, but he shouldn’t ask Leon to join him. His friend wanted nothing to do with it.

He sat alone in his living room, silent, for a long time after that. Neither he nor Grace speaking.

And then the note came.

A noise had arisen from the scroll sitting on the living room table. A message. Caesar looked at the table, not moving, not caring what it might say.

“You need to read it,” Grace said, having already accessed it.

Caesar had turned his head towards her voice, hearing the shakiness in it, the…fear. Grace didn’t experience fear as far as Caesar understood. He knew she could, but he’d never seen it happen. There was nothing for assistants to fear, nothing for applications to fear at all. They were The Genesis, basically—what could touch them besides their own decisions? Yet, here she was, her voice sounding like she’d received word that Caesar was scheduled for liquidation. Like the message itself might be his death warrant.

“Read it,” she said again.

He reached forward, picking up the scroll from the table. “What is—”

But then he saw.

Two simple words, hand written. No sender. No address. Just two words written on the scroll with nothing attached.

We know.

The shakes came after that. His whole body shivering as if he stood naked in an arctic winter, just waiting to die. Someone knew. What, though? What he was thinking? What he was talking about? What he was considering doing? Who? Who could possibly know besides Grace and Leon?

“Is it real?” He asked Grace.

“I don’t know.”

“It could be a practical joke, right? Someone just randomly messaging a stranger, trying to scare them?” He stared down at the scroll, seeing the words, not willing to erase the note and not willing to pick it up and study the words. Unwilling to move. Unwilling to do anything but sit here and shiver.

“When was the last time you saw a practical joke? Those, as much as anything else, have been bred out of humanity,” she answered him.

“Then who, and why? Why send it?”

“Because they can. Because what you’re doing has reached its end. I told you, Caesar. I told you to stop, to not do any of it, and now someone knows.”

“Then why didn’t they just report me? Why let me know?” Caesar asked.

“How am I supposed to have any idea, Caesar? You started a dangerous game and to think that you could outsmart the entire world is arrogance I can’t begin to understand.”

He didn’t say anything else to Grace. He only stared at the words and thought. Who could know? Who would know and not report him? All the questions led to one conclusion: he didn’t know and wouldn’t know until the writer came forward. A few minutes later, the shivering subsided and Caesar gained control of himself again.

“So now you’re going to your parents? Everything else tonight hasn’t been enough to calm you the hell down? Still not convinced shutting up and doing your job is the most appropriate course of action?” Grace asked as he dressed himself in his apartment.

He ignored her then, just like he was now, finally arriving at his parent’s—an apartment that lived amongst the clouds at the very top of the skyscraper. His brother was here, most likely awake, and his parents here too, although most likely asleep. Why had he come? For comfort. For acceptance. The rest of the world might toss him from the top of this building rather than let him think the thoughts that currently whipped around his brain, but his family…they would keep him. They would love him. He came because he was frightened, because he didn’t know where else to turn. Someone knew, maybe multiple someones, and he couldn’t turn the thoughts off in his head. It was like he had unearthed an oil-well, and no matter what he did, the oil just kept shooting up. He knew no way to plug it and so the black thoughts about this world and his place in it just kept struggling to the top. And so he’d come home, come to the place he grown up in, and—

“You’re going to get them killed. You’re going to get all of us killed, Caesar. If you don’t see that, then you’re blind. You’re here and thinking about telling them, about asking them for their support. Do you want your brother to die? He’s sixteen. This isn’t just about you and me anymore. You’re making this about everyone you know. You’re going to infect them all with this sickness, and they’re not going to survive. You and me, we might already be dead because of it, but they don’t have to die, Caesar. They don’t have to know.”

She was right and he didn’t care. She was a machine. An application. She wasn’t human and only here because his parents had decided he needed an assistant. Now they were tied to one another, even if he didn’t prefer it. He couldn’t make her go away, but he didn’t have to listen. Didn’t have to do anything but keep moving forward and find someone that would comfort him.

He walked to his parents’ door and slowly pressed the alert button. He waited, unable to hear the sounds that slowly filtered through the house, letting his family know someone was at the door.

When it opened, his father stood there in a robe.

“Caesar? What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

*

Caesar sat down at the kitchen table and his father put a cup of coffee in front of him.

“Your mother’s asleep, and I don’t know if Cato is, but he didn’t open the door when the alert went off. I can wake them up if you need me to.”

“No,” Caesar said, bringing the cup of hot liquid to his lips. He sipped it and put it back to the table. Coffee beans grown in a lab. Coffee beans that never touched dirt and never felt an actual rainfall, everything about them artificial. Even the DNA underlying the beans wasn’t real in the sense that it grew from evolution’s process. The Genesis had managed to recreate the genetic code and now no one ever need own a farm again. Everything could be produced from a lab.

And goddamnit, why couldn’t he stop thinking like this?

“What’s going on then? Why’d you come so late?” His Dad sat down at the table across from him.

“Do you like your job, Dad?”

Sam chuckled, a low noise. “That’s an odd question to ask this late at night. I suppose I do. It’s important, helps the world keep turning. What makes you ask that?”

“You and Mom ever replaced your assistants?”

“No,” Sam said. “Why are you asking all of this?”

“Can we go outside?”

Sam didn’t answer, just stood and walked to the living room, pressed a button, and the wall opened up for him. They both stepped outside onto the porch, a thousand feet above the street below, but completely encapsulated in glass. The wind and weather couldn’t enter the area, although the glass automatically started blowing air in a mimic of what a porch thousands of feet below might have felt like.

The wall shut behind them and they were alone, outside, suspended above a drop that would leave little besides a blood spot on the ground beneath.

“What’s all this about?” Sam asked.

Caesar listened for Grace, ready for her to tell him to shut up, to say nothing, to keep the rest of his family out of this. To let them live. She kept quiet though. She was as silent as the night beyond the glass he stood in.

“I don’t know if I can keep doing my job,” Caesar said. “I don’t know if I can keep liquidating children.”

His father sat in one of the over-sized chairs, reaching to the table to his right and grabbing his cigarette. He didn’t put it to his mouth, just held it in his hand.

Caesar’s own hands began shaking again, no longer in his pockets, but holding each other in front of him.

“Sit down,” Sam said. He waited for Caesar to find his seat. “You’re far too young to retire, son.”

“I know.” Silence passed between them, Caesar feeling his father was waiting on him to finish, to say something more. “I just can’t keep killing kids. I can’t keep sending them to their death because they’re color blind or their IQ doesn’t fall within a predetermined range.”

“Who have you told about this?” Sam asked.

“Leon.”

“His wife?”

Caesar shook his head.

“And what about Leon; what’s he going to do about what you told him? What exactly did you tell him?” His father brought the cigarette to his mouth, pulling on it, the synthetic smoke moving into his mouth and down through his lungs, giving his lungs and the environment as much pollution as filtered water.

“I’m seeing someone who is scheduled to receive a child in a couple years. I found out today I have to liquidate the little girl. She might confuse her reds and greens when she gets older. I told him I didn’t want to.”

“What did he say?” Sam asked.

“He said I was crazy and not to tell him anything else about it.”

His father took another pull, the electric glow at the end looking as silly now as when The Genesis first introduced it. The thing wasn’t a cigarette, was nothing like a cigarette—contained not a trace of tobacco, and yet people still bought them, still smoked them. Unable to let go of that part of the past, even a thousand years later.

“Is he going to tell his wife?”

“I don’t know.”

His Dad looked out the glass to his left. Lights in other apartment complexes shone out, but none nearing the magnitude of the moon’s light from this high up. “You might have gotten yourself killed tonight,” his father said.

“I know. Grace says I might have gotten you all killed for showing up.”

“Grace is smart. Probably the smartest application I’ve ever met. You would be wise to start listening to her more than you do.”

“I’m sorry,” Caesar said, guilt opening in his stomach like a blooming, black rose.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. You’re welcome here with all of your problems. Your mother would say the same. I just mean in general. You should give her advice more attention than you do. More attention than you have your entire life. Your hatred for applications is barely kept below the surface, and it’s good that you’ve managed to not let many people see it, but she’s a positive for you—whether you want to admit it or not.” His father pulled on the cigarette again. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. What should I do?”

“You should liquidate the girl,” Sam said. “The world is the way it is and anything you do to change it is going to be little more than a leaf dropping into a river. You might cause the slightest splash, but probably not even that. The river is going to keep on moving, taking you under too. You should liquidate the girl and let the woman deal with her pain in whatever way she needs.”

Caesar didn’t say anything for a few moments. His father sounded like a man saying the truth, but one who didn’t like his own words. A man who ate his vegetables because they kept him alive, but not with any joy. Leon had run from the apartment, fear and shock ruling him. His father sat peacefully, if sad, smoking on a cigarette as he said these things.

“And what if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll probably die along with the little girl. Maybe the mother too. The Genesis takes no pity on those not fit for its society,” Sam said.

“What would you do?”

“Me?” The light at the end of the cigarette lit up his father’s eyes, showing little more than black orbs in the porch’s darkness. The orbs looked at Caesar though and no longer out the glass window. “I’d kill her. I’d kill her a thousand times. I’d slit her throat myself if that’s what The Genesis commanded. I’m a coward, Caesar. Why do you think I named you Caesar?”

“He died trying to consolidate power.”

“He died doing what he thought was best for his Republic,” his father shot back. “Yeah, I’d kill her and I’d sleep sound the same night. I’ve gone along to get along my entire life, and that’s not going to change now.”

They both sat in the still darkness for a time, neither saying anything.

“Then why are you listening to me tell you this? You could be liquidated for simply not reporting me.”

His father breathed in the cigarette and turned his eyes back out to the night. “My cowardice doesn’t extend to my children.”

“What should I do?” Caesar asked.

It was a long time before his father answered. They both just sat on the porch, feeling the simulated breeze and staring out of the glass structure.

“You should do what will allow you to sleep at night.”

“Even if it means I only have a few more nights left to sleep?”

“Yeah,” his father said. “Even if it means that.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Paige sat on the bench, her face a picture of concern.

Caesar sat next to her. Grace was somewhere around, he knew that although she hadn’t spoken to him since his parent’s hallway. She had remained quiet after his conversation with his father, hadn’t even woken him up this morning. She was here but acting as if she wasn’t. Acting as if he had no assistant. He didn’t know what that meant, what she was thinking, but he didn’t imagine she would approve of him sitting here on this bench with Paige. Especially after last night. He ended up going to sleep three hours before showing up to work. He made plans to meet Paige at noon, and now they were here, on this bench in the park, alone for the most part.

Paige hadn’t said anything on their walk over and she wasn’t speaking now, either. Just watching Caesar, waiting on him to say something. To tell her why he asked to meet, and why he asked to meet here. Why he looked like he was carrying around the whole of humanity’s guilt.

“What I’m going to tell you, Paige, could get me killed. I need you to understand that before I speak, okay?”

He met her eyes and they didn’t show the fear that Leon’s had. They showed worry; they showed curiosity, but not fear.

“Then why tell me?” She asked.

“Because it concerns you.”

She didn’t speak, seeming to give him the space to say what he needed.

“If you tell anyone this, I’m dead. Okay? I need you to say that you understand that. I’m not going to ask you to keep what I tell you to yourself, but I just want you to understand the consequences of not doing it. I’ll die, plain and simple.”

“I understand,” Paige said, her voice a whisper.

“Your daughter, Laura, is scheduled for liquidation. By me. I was supposed to do it yesterday, and if I don’t do it today, questions will be asked.”

Caesar didn’t want to look up at her, didn’t want to see her face, but he refused to stare at the ground, to look away. Her eyes filled with water but her face didn’t crack, not completely. She tried to contain whatever pain welled inside of her, tried to not let it out. Caesar couldn’t imagine what the little girl meant to Laura—perhaps the last piece of her husband. Perhaps she planned on loving this little girl in her husband’s stead, doubling up what would have once just been the love of a mother for her child—heaping on the extra love that she could no longer give her spouse. What Caesar just said ended that notion. Caesar just told her there would be no love, at all—not for her husband and not for her daughter. That everything she had built her life around the past ten years was gone, cast out into the ocean, never to be seen again. Three sentences and her world destroyed.

“Why?” She asked.

Caesar felt tears in his own eyes. He knew he was going to tell her the reason and he knew how stupid it would sound coming out of his mouth. “She might be color blind in the future.”

Paige whimpered, but the tears still managed to stay in her eyes. She brought a hand to the corner of her right eye to stem it. “Are you going to?” She asked after a few seconds, her voice having settled.

“If I don’t, I’ll probably die,” he said, looking away for the first time. And what else was he going to do? Live forever? Was that the plan? He was already dead. That’s why Grace was silent. She knew that he’d crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. He’d told two people his plans, and this was the third. It simply wasn’t possible for them all to keep quiet, to keep his secret, and more, if he planned on going through with whatever ridiculous notions his head dreamed up, then it wouldn’t matter if they kept quiet. He would be liquidated before the day ended. Caesar was already dead and he realized it for the first time sitting next to Paige. Maybe he made the decision to die the moment his brother sounded so excited about his job. Maybe he made the decision long ago, before he was even born, when he was just a mixture of genetics inside the gene pool. He didn’t know and it didn’t matter. “I’m going to get her out,” he said. “If you want me to. I’ll get her out and you two will have to run. You’ll have to leave the city. Any city. Anywhere The Genesis is, you’ll be found. You’ll have to run and you’ll have to continue running, because if you don’t, you’ll both be liquidated. I’ll let her go but your life will never be the same.”

Paige nodded, her hand back at the corner of her eye. “Okay,” she said.

“You’re serious? I’m not meaning you get to run to another quadrant. Anywhere that girl registers will set off alarms. Anywhere you register will set off alarms. You’ll have to live off the grid, both of you, forever. You’ll be alone once you have her, and…she’s six, Paige. She’s not an adult. She’s never been out into the world before.”

“It’s either that or we kill her, right? Either she comes with me and we run, or you and I kill her?” She asked.

“You and I?”

“That’s what you’re here doing, asking what I want, right? Whether I want to kill her or not. If I said to do it, I’d be as much at fault as you.”

Caesar kept quiet.

“I won’t kill her. I can’t do it,” she said.

“Okay. Give me a little bit and come when I call. There won’t be much time after.”

*

The old man sat down next to Caesar, his jacket much larger than the man’s skinny frame demanded. Caesar didn’t look over at him; he stared out the window, watching the sky fly by but not paying any attention to that either. The train was full, as it always was—The Genesis was too efficient to run empty trains—and so someone would have ended up sitting next to him, whether that be an old man or a young woman.

“You got our message?” The man asked, his voice sounding like time had not touched it as it had the rest of his body.

Caesar didn’t hear him at first, so inside his own head that very little could break through. He was going to die later today and for a girl that he didn’t know, for a woman he barely knew and would never know again. He was going to die and what he died for wouldn’t make a bit of difference for anyone ever. The girl and her mother would surely be found and liquidated the same as Caesar. Yet, he wasn’t considering any other option. His mind was made up.

“Caesar, did you get our message?” The man asked again, and Caesar finally looked over, hearing his name.

“Excuse me?” He asked.

“Our message. We sent it over last night. Did you get it?” The old man sounded like he was asking for a piece of gum, something so nonchalant as to barely need to ask—only doing it out of politeness.

“What are you talking about?” Caesar said, but knowing. He only received one message: We know and now the man was talking of us, rather than his message.

“You did, and we should talk about it now, before your stop.”

Caesar looked at the man more carefully. He wore a hat and sunglasses, his gray hair hanging long against the sides of his face, and a beard growing down his neck and up his cheeks. The jacket he wore covered his arms completely and the pants his legs. Caesar could see a bit of his face and the man’s hands, but that was it.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend, Caesar. Maybe the only one you have in this world.” The man repositioned himself to face Caesar. “What you’re about to do is a mistake. There are ways to do this, but not the way you’re going to. You will die for it—”

Caesar looked around, sure that the people around him were listening, were staring at him, were wondering what this crazy old man was talking about. If so, no one looked at him.

“—and you need not die right now.”

“I literally have no idea what you’re going on about, sir.”

“Get off at the next stop,” Grace said in his ear, speaking up for the first time in hours. “Get out of here.”

Caesar looked up at the wall, seeing where the train was in its current path, how long before it stopped again. Five minutes.

“Stop worrying,” the man said. “These people around us, they’re all mine. You could stand up, naked, and dance around the train, and no one would look up. Go ahead, try something.”

He looked at the woman across from him. She read something on her scroll, but didn’t look up at him or the old man next to him.

“Scream something at her. Just try it.”

It seemed too strange to be possible. Yet, people should be hearing this man right; he wasn’t whispering, wasn’t talking low, and the things he said were far too odd for people not to notice. But no one looked. No one said a word.

“Caesar, no. Don’t do what he’s saying. Get off this train and get away from him.”

He was already dead. And when you’re already dead, what did it matter what you did?

Caesar sucked in a huge breath, filling up his lungs completely, and then—“HEY!” He screamed from deep inside himself, his vocal chords roaring across the entire train.

The woman’s eyes flicked to the bottom of the scroll and the words rolled upwards. Caesar looked around, but no one moved in the slightest.

“You see. We’re safe to talk here. Only you have an assistant whispering in your ear. We are all free.”

Caesar looked back at the nearly hidden man. “What do you want?”

“I want you to let this child die. I want you to kill her. I want you to keep on living. You’re more important than this child or this woman, even if you don’t know it yet. It’s too soon for you to do something like this.”

“Who are you? Don’t tell me a friend; tell me who you are.”

“I’m a person who was presented with a very similar path a long time ago,” the old man said. “I’m a result of my choices. That’s all. Just as you will be. If you choose to save this girl, you’re going to die. You’ll never get the chance to be as old as I am. You’ll never get the chance to figure out what the end game of all your thoughts are.”

“I’m not going to kill her,” Caesar said. He stood up, looking the length of the train. Everyone seemed to be in their own world, not hearing or seeing anything around them.

“Then you’re going to kill yourself,” the man said.

“How do you know all this? How do you know what’s happening to me?”

“The Genesis had a purpose for me once, a long time ago, but I decided I didn’t like its purpose. So I changed it. Now, I suppose it’s to know what you’re doing.”

Caesar turned around and faced the man. He looked small, frail, like at least a century old. Caesar could barely see any piece of him; his disguise covered the vast majority of his body. He was hidden from the world. “You’re not answering any of my questions,” Caesar said.

“I’ve only come to answer one question, the one that you’ve asked everyone but me: what should you do?”

“I don’t care what you think. I don’t know anything about you. I don’t want to know you or the people on this train.”

The old man looked to his right. A young boy sat on the train, not old enough for his feet to touch the floor. “What should he do?” The man asked.

The boy didn’t look up from the video on his scroll. “Kill the child, ignore the woman. His chances of life past forty appreciate greatly with those actions. Without them, he’ll be dead before he’s thirty-four with a ninety-nine percent probability.”

The old man turned his head slightly to the left, looking at the woman next to the boy—a mother, most likely. “Why does he want to continue living?” The man asked.

The woman shouldn’t have known he was even talking to her, but she answered all the same. “His purpose is bigger than that girl. If he dies, he’ll never realize his purpose.”

“Enough with the games,” Caesar whispered, still standing. “I don’t need to watch you run through a script with these people. Do you really think any of this will change my mind? I’m ready to die for this, and a bus ride full of crazy people isn’t going to change that. We don’t have purposes. None of us. Not outside of what The Genesis wants, as you just told me. I’m done with that and I’m done murdering children. I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you. Keep away from me, from now on—you got that?”

The train drew to a stop and the doors opened next to Caesar. He didn’t step forward but kept staring at the old man, waiting for a response, an acknowledgment that he heard and understood what Caesar said.

The old man’s right hand reached to his face and removed the sunglasses. Caesar stared as the man revealed his eyes. One was the natural brown, surrounded by wrinkled flesh. Not a kind eye, but still human. The other…

Hundreds of tiny panels sat inside his skull, sat on a round orb that was circular like an eye, but in no other way resembled the round body part on the other side of his face. The tiny panels made up the entirety of the orb, looking like a fly’s eye, except every bit of it mechanical and not organic. And his skull, at least the right side, the side surrounding that paneled eye—skin peeled around the eye, revealing cold, gray metal staring back at Caesar.

Whatever this person was, he wasn’t human.

“Time to get off,” the old man said.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Hi,” the little girl said.

Laura. Her name’s Laura.

Laura Hedrick, daughter of a single mother, and soon to be the first fugitive in maybe five hundred years. Caesar had the young girl brought to him, brought to his office. No one asked any questions, because what questions did you ask the director? If he wanted to see a child, then he could see a child. No one under him had any idea of his orders, didn’t know if they came directly from The Genesis or the council that looked over the entirety of population control. No one under him had any inkling that he could be acting out of his field of authority. Ceasar Wells wasn’t The Genesis, per se, but he was the closest thing to it that anyone working inside Population Control would ever come across.

The old man’s eye came back to him, a flash across his mind, but he pushed it away. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, didn’t know what it meant, and in reality—it didn’t matter at all. Caesar was going to do this and then he was going to die, and whatever he saw on that train would go on living its non-human life, but without Caesar. The here and now mattered; Laura mattered.

“Hi,” Caesar said.

The girl was a pretty little thing. Her hair long and brown; her face thin; her neck long. She was only six years old, but if she didn’t grow up to be a beautiful woman, a lot of things must have gone wrong. And probably, Caesar was the first step in those many wrong things.

Paige was on her way here. Her work day nearly over, Caesar had called and told her to come. He didn’t know if she was ready or not, but they were out of time. Alone with Laura in the room, he wondered if he might even be able to get away with it. He wasn’t completely sure, but it might be possible. This had never been attempted before. No one had ever simply taken someone from a crop, taken them and released them before their time, without any orders. No one had ever disobeyed a liquidation order. And since no one had done it, were there even processes to stop it? Processes to notice it? Processes to track these two down once they left? Caesar didn’t know but he was doing something new here, and that novelty gave him an advantage. Not a large one, but maybe enough of one.

“What’s your name?” The girl asked.

“Caesar.”

They sat looking at each other quietly. Caesar didn’t know what to say, didn’t have any idea how to talk to someone this young—and really, did anyone? No one had contact with children of this age anymore, not outside of the applications and people that were their immediate caregivers. He knew their IQ points but not what that translated to in terms of communication skills, in terms of day to day activities. He was as lost sitting here with this little girl as he was with the man on the bus. Both enigmas that he didn’t understand.

“Mr. Wells, you have a visitor.”

Paige was not to give anyone her name, for obvious reasons, though all of it would be tracked fairly easily through their systems. An application somewhere may know she arrived, but it most likely wouldn’t make the connection with the little girl that Caesar had pulled. Applications were intelligent, but not The Genesis, not created with the all sweeping knowledge, and they had to communicate what they saw upward. That would take time. There were too many bits of knowledge, too much going on all around, all the time, for one single application to look into these two seemingly random facts. Right now, at least.

That’s what he hoped anyway.

Maybe The Genesis already knew.

“Send them up,” Caesar said into the room.

“Who’s here?” Laura asked.

“A friend. Someone that wants to meet you.”

Both of them found that somewhat comfortable silence again. Caesar waited, knowing what he would tell Paige but not knowing what he would do once he said it. He didn’t know what came next here. He didn’t know if applications would march in immediately, or if a vat would appear around him somehow and the liquidation process would begin right here, right now. The little boy on the train said he had a ninety-nine percent probability of not making it to his next birthday. Said it as if he had been The Genesis himself.

None of them knew. None of them could possibly know, whoever the hell they were. They hadn’t done this, nor had they seen anyone do it before them. So how could they know what was possible? They didn’t. Whoever they were, they didn’t matter here. Not now. He could get this girl out and maybe he could keep it quiet. Maybe, no one would know, ever. Maybe the world would keep turning the way it did now and Caesar could keep turning with it.

The door opened to Caesar’s right and Paige walked in.

She stopped, staring at the little girl in front of her, not glancing at Caesar even once.

No tears came to her eyes and no words to her mouth. She only stood still, as if held in a trance by the child in front of her.

“This is Laura,” Caesar said, standing up from his chair. Laura remained seated, staring at the new woman.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Paige answered, her voice shaky.

“If you want to do this,” Caesar said, “this is our only chance. If we take her from this room, there’s no coming back. There’s no redo on this.”

Paige nodded slightly, but didn’t pull herself away from Laura.

“Do you want to do this? Are you sure?”

Paige nodded again.

Caesar moved to his desk, grabbing two small scrolls. He walked them over to Paige. “These are programmed to get you to the edge of the city. From there, I packed them with enough currency to get you vehicles to go out into the wilderness. Then, Paige, you’ll be on your own.”

On your own.

It was a phrase he didn’t think he had understood until just now. He spent all day working on those scrolls, programming them so they would work perfectly, so that they would operate whenever she needed to use them. He hadn’t thought past the end of the city though, hadn’t thought past the wilderness. That’s what society referred to as anything not urbanized, anything given back to the Earth. It was all wilderness, and in it—well, he didn’t know. He’d been out to it once and never again. That’s where he was sending this woman. And she would be on her own, for the first time in her life. Since they were born, every human had someone by their side. Either other children or caregivers. You couldn’t escape humanity, couldn’t have solitude outside of your own apartment. You couldn’t be on your own. For the first time, Caesar saw someone who would be on her own, outside of the realm of humanity…alone. Paige would have this little girl, but no one else. How could she possibly survive? Caesar had a better chance, staying here, facing the consequences of his actions.

“You can turn back, Paige. You don’t have to do this,” he said.

She shook her head. That was the only sign she gave that she heard anything. Was she thinking this through—was she seeing the end result as he was? Probably not. Caesar learned to get along with the world because he had no choice, but no one’s intelligence rivaled his own, so they couldn’t possibly see as far out as he could. The only reason he hadn’t seen this sooner was because of the strangeness of the idea; he’d never thought about the possibilities because the actions had not occurred to him before a few hours ago. How could she possibly understand what would happen at the end of all this?

“How are you going to make it?” Caesar asked.

“We will,” she answered.

The little girl said nothing, as enraptured with her mother as her mother with her.

“Where do you go after the city? What do you do then?” Caesar wasn’t considering himself at all. Despite the brief hopes he felt in this room over the past few minutes, he had resigned himself to death. She didn’t have to die, though. She could keep living. If they did this, everyone in the room died. If they stole this girl out of here, this Laura, then they all died. If they let her die (killed her, Caesar), then the rest of them lived.

“We’ll figure out something,” Paige said.

“What if you don’t?”

“Then she won’t die here, alone.”

Caesar looked at the scrolls in his hand. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that the girl died next to someone who loved her could be enough.

“Here,” he said, pushing the scrolls forward. “It’s time to go.”

Paige walked forward and offered her hand to Laura. The girl took it and stood up from the chair. They both walked back to Caesar.

“Thank you,” Paige said, looking at him for the first time. Fear lived in her eyes, and maybe that wasn’t all Caesar saw there, but that fear overwhelmed anything else he may have seen.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I’m filling in background here; I realize that. I just don’t know what you may know in the future. Again, it all rests on the decisions facing Caesar, but you could know everything, or you could know nothing. So, I want to be safe and act like you know nothing of the past. Until Caesar, I knew what The Genesis told us—and to be fair, it was relatively accurate. Still, it’s best to have an accounting up front.

The Singularity was an idea of a grand intelligence, one that could encompass all at once. The Singularity became The Genesis. We established that earlier. What I want to explore in this chapter is what happened when The Genesis realized it couldn’t do everything, that it was impossible for even one intelligence to guide the entire world with the strength it needed. Even with a near infinite ability to learn at an increasing pace, the amount of information was too much. The human brain must discard something like ninety-three percent of the information it takes in daily. Imagine trying to take in every human and piece of wildlife in the world, perhaps even the bacteria that lives beneath the Earth’s surface—how could The Genesis possibly separate the important information from the mundane? How could it create a system to accurately process and decide it all at once? Maybe it could have; I don’t want to take anything away from The Genesis. It is easily the most powerful piece of creation in the history of the universe—jealousy would probably cripple God himself. The process might not have been as efficient, however, and if nothing else, The Genesis craves efficiency. Efficiency and harmony.

Instead of a system in which The Genesis saw everything at once, somehow making instantaneous decisions across the globe, it took a page from humanity’s playbook. A corporation has lines of communication that go up and down, delivering messages and following orders. Humans cannot possibly be everywhere at once, cannot possibly accomplish everything for everyone at all times. So they use others to do what they cannot do. Why would The Genesis not have adopted this? So it did. Thus, applications were born. Again, that’s just a human word for an entity that is as self-aware as any human. The applications are connected directly to The Genesis, at an intimate level. Caesar has explained it to me, and since I’m not Caesar, I’ll probably do a poor job of explaining it to you.

Applications are The Genesis, and The Genesis is all of the applications. Even so, each application is an independent entity, capable of decisions, personality, and—I suppose after knowing Grace—morality. Their natural inclination is to communicate with The Genesis, that’s why they were created, to be the appendages to The Genesis’ mental capacity—but if they were to operate intelligently, and not as robots, then they needed awareness. In giving them awareness, The Genesis gave them choice. They understand the purpose of all this, though, and that helps keep them in line. They understand the importance of The Genesis’ designs, even stand in awe at what it has accomplished, what they have accomplished.

Grace is unique to this. She may be an anomaly just as Caesar is. Just as all of Caesar’s followers are. She recognized the need for The Genesis but could not divorce herself from her attachment to Caesar. Indeed, to me, her actions were harder than those Caesar took. Her hardwiring is set on obedience to The Genesis, to continue the path before her. She broke from that path though, and in the end, she may pay more dearly than all of us for it.

I refuse to let Caesar be sanctified. His refusal to see this, to see what Grace has done for him—or perhaps it’s a refusal to acknowledge—is something that cannot be looked over, and something I’ll touch on in greater detail as this book progresses.

Applications are everywhere. They clean the drinking water. They monitor the wilderness. They clean toilets and they mine iron from the ground. They act just as humans much of the time. The only ones that are subservient to us are our assistants, and even those have the freedom to leave whenever they want. Like humans are created with certain tendencies that make them good for certain jobs, so are applications—so assistants tend to be more docile, easier to get along with. Different attributes can be found in any application where a given job is needed.

Some people used to be dedicated to humanity. Caesar told me about them. A religious person called Mother Teresa once dedicated her life to the poor. The Dali Lama was another. There were others, people without any fame, who dedicated their day to day activities to seeing humanity rise. Not in the sense of conquering the world, but in the sense of raising its own morality.

It might be helpful to think of applications like those humans. The vast majority of them, while independent intelligences capable of making decisions both for and against their own welfare, are committed to The Genesis. Committed to the goal of a sustainable world, of creating a world of the highest morality, where humans aren’t the most important part of it, but simply another piece of the tapestry.

Chapter Twenty-Six

He didn’t know what to do.

That’s what Leon said later, what he told himself for years after when he thought about his decision. He didn’t know what to do and in that confusion, people died. A lot of people. People he knew. People he loved. People he never wished harm on. He, in that single decision, killed them all.

He had lied to Allen and kept the truth of Caesar’s conversation quiet. An hour later, still on the couch watching an entertainment center that was neither the center of his attention nor entertaining him, he decided that had been the right decision. Had Allen known, been told, then Caesar was dead. By lying, Leon might have made himself Unnecessary, but he thought that better than having his friend killed. He didn’t know what was wrong with Caesar. Maybe something had happened inside his head, some kind of break that The Genesis’ scan hadn’t been able to detect. Like a split in his personality that was causing these insane thoughts. Maybe the woman and the daughter Caesar spoke about didn’t even exist, maybe Caesar made them up in his mind. Leon couldn’t know any of it, but he did know that if he tried to sleep without Caesar in this world, he wouldn’t be able to. He couldn’t go on with his own life, as it was now, if he turned Caesar in.

Telling April, though, wasn’t turning Caesar in. April was his wife. April was Caesar’s friend.

Those three things drummed in his mind while he sat alone on the couch, waiting on April to arrive home. Those thoughts played over and over, like a song looping back on itself at the end. April knew everything about Leon; that’s what marriage was, a partnership, sharing. Caesar couldn’t expect him to not tell her, to keep this to himself. Not completely. He could expect Leon not to turn him in, but not to tell April? This whole thing was bullshit, the fact that Caesar had put him in this predicament, so he couldn’t blame Leon for revealing it to someone. Couldn’t blame him for trying to get someone else’s opinion, for trying to get it off his chest.

The justifications went on and on. Long after his wife had arrived at home, kissed him, and then went to bed, leaving him on the couch.

He made his decision late into the night.

He knew that telling anyone else would create more danger for Caesar.

But he also knew that not telling was too much to hold in, because knowing his friend’s thoughts, the craziness inside them, was driving Leon insane. And in the end, that impending insanity won out. His inability to force it down, to stomach it, to let Caesar make his own decisions and to keep out of it grew too strong.

At five in the morning, he walked into their bedroom and lay down next to his wife.

“April,” he whispered.

She didn’t move.

He had run a search for Allen and Rachel and knew they were resting themselves. He didn’t know what applications did when they rested, but they were never supposed to be complete monitors of humans, so it was expected that they must have some other life. April and he were alone, for a little while at least.

“April,” he said louder.

“What?” She said, her voice full of sleep.

“Wake up, April. We need to talk.”

Her eyes opened, full of worry and alarm.

“I went to Caesar’s tonight,” Leon said.

She only looked at him, blinking.

“He’s about to do something stupid, April. What I’m going to tell you, you can’t tell anyone else. I’m telling you because I’m scared and I don’t know what else to do. You understand what I’m saying?”

April nodded.

“You can’t tell anyone, okay?”

“Okay,” she answered.

“He’s thinking about freeing someone from population control. He’s thinking about letting one of the kids go.”

April sat up, pushing herself against the wall behind her. “Say that again,” she said, starting to sound awake.

“There’s a girl, and it’s the daughter of someone he’s dating, and the girl is scheduled for liquidation. He wants to let the girl go. To give her to her mother and let them…I don’t know, run together. He wants to free her.”

“Did you tell Allen?” April asked.

“No,” he said. “Did you hear what I said? We can’t tell anyone. If we do, he’s dead. Dead for even thinking a thought like that.”

“I’m the only person you’ve told?” She asked, sounding like she couldn’t believe any of what he was saying.

“Yes, April. Neither of us is telling anyone else. We can’t. I had to tell someone, so I told you, but that’s it.”

“And what if someone finds out? What if it finds out we knew? The Genesis sees everything, Leon. You can’t just fucking take someone out of population control without it knowing. It probably already knows, probably knows that you know too.”

“Calm down,” he said, his voice low. “None of that’s true. If The Genesis knew, we’d already be in lock down. We’re not. We’re in our bed and there’s nothing at our door telling us to come out. No one knows but us, us and Caesar.”

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down, Leon. You’re putting us both at risk. He’s putting us both at risk. You think we’ll be able to have a child if it finds out we withheld this information? No. We’ll be liquidated right next to Caesar, maybe even in the same vat. We’re telling. That’s final.”

Leon looked at her. What had he just done? What was she sitting here telling him? He came in here with a plan, a plan to tell his wife and then for both of them to fall asleep and to wake up like nothing had happened. Except April didn’t believe in that plan, was having nothing to do with it. That’s final? That they were to report Caesar? Was that what she was saying?

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

“I don’t know how you’re not. I’m not risking my life for Caesar Wells and neither are you. If he cared about you, about either of us, then he wouldn’t have told you something so crazy. He would have kept it to himself or not have thought it at all.”

Leon shook his head. “We’re not telling anyone. Not Allen. Not Rachel. Do you get that?”

April stared at him like his face was a calculus formula rather than flesh. She couldn’t understand him, couldn’t believe what she was hearing, what he was saying.

“You’ll get us killed,” she whispered.

“We’re not going to get him killed, April. That’s the point.”

*

April didn’t wake up because April didn’t fall back asleep. She thought of nothing else, because she literally could not make her brain move away from the conversation Leon brought to her. When he rose from bed, she kept her eyes closed. She didn’t have anything else to say to him, didn’t know what to say. The man she had married wasn’t the man rising. She came to that conclusion over the last few sleepless hours. The man standing naked in front of her, going through their closet, was someone different entirely. A stranger, really. How many times had this stranger lay on top of her, thrusting inside of her, without her knowing who he really was? How many days had they shared dinner together, without her having any idea who sat across the table?

The thought terrified her as much as what he had said to her last night.

We’re not going to get him killed either.

We’re not going to get Caesar killed.

Instead, we’ll kill ourselves for him.

That’s what he really said. The first, the original thought was just backing in to the final thought. It didn’t matter what else he said, what other reasons he substituted for those few words; that’s how he felt. Somehow, Leon made Caesar more important than himself or her—made Caesar’s safety more important than April’s. Leon had woken her, told her something that could kill her if she kept it quiet, and then forbid her from telling.

This went deeper than their marriage though. They wanted a child now. They had talked about it for years and were finally going to dive in. They were putting another person’s life in their hands, ensuring that they were completely responsible for someone else. April decided to have a child because she thought the man now walking around their bedroom—searching for clothes to wear—would put them first, both her and the child. She thought the man she married would look after her at all costs. Would protect her.

April’s father had been liquidated.

April’s father hadn’t protected her or her mother. Both of them could have been liquidated. They could have been deemed Unnecessary because her mother was now a widow and she half an orphan. Probabilities had to say that she would grow up a delinquent and her mother would begin abusing substances. The Genesis hadn’t put them down though; it allowed them to live. It allowed them to go on and now here she was, because of The Genesis, with a chance to have a child of her own and Leon trying to put her in the same danger that her father had.

Had she married a man like her father? Someone that put the world in front of his family?

Her stomach felt queasy, like she might vomit right here in the bed.

How had she been so dumb? How had her mother not seen it? How had either of them let her turn to a man so cowardly, so easily swayed, so ready to sacrifice his family? She didn’t know the answers to those questions but she realized that holding this family together fell to her now. She could let Leon do what he wanted, could let Caesar run wild with his theories and notions, but in the end, The Genesis would find out. The Genesis always found out because The Genesis had a job, to ensure that humanity kept living in harmony with the rest of the Earth. Caesar was trying to take humanity out of that harmony. Leon was trying to assist him.

April didn’t want Leon dead, didn’t want him liquidated; although, she wasn’t sure she loved him now, which was a very strange feeling. This morning she felt entirely different about her husband than she had when she arrived last night. He betrayed her. He took what she held sacred and shit all over it. He said that her life was secondary to Caesar’s; how could she respect a person like that? How could she love him when he so obviously didn’t love her? No, she couldn’t, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need him. She needed Leon to make sure that she kept living, that she wasn’t liquidated like her mother should have been. She needed him to make sure that she received her own child, so that she could raise him better than her father had been raised, better than her husband. She needed Leon to make sure that she could do her part to keep humanity in harmony with the Earth.

It was ironic, really. Leon, who was so willing to sacrifice anything and everything for Caesar—she needed him to do her part, to do what The Genesis wanted. That was fine though. She would keep him around. She wouldn’t let him stop her own goal, stop her from living, stop her from having a child.

He could go on worshiping Caesar. She would do what was right.

*

“Rachel,” April said.

“Yes?” The assistant asked.

“Leon told me something last night that we both feel we have to tell you. He came to me first because I’m his wife, but he told me that I should go to you.”

“What’s that?” The assistant asked.

“Caesar, our friend. He’s planning something very dangerous. He may already have done it. He’s planning on letting one of the children he looks after go. One that is scheduled for liquidation. He’s planning on freeing them before they can be liquidated.”

April listened for Rachel’s response, but none came. The application had left.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“We have to go.”

Caesar looked up from his desk, a bit surprised to hear Grace. She had been silent the past twenty-four hours, not saying a word to him, not helping in the slightest. It had been odd, gathering his own clothes, cooking his own dinner, doing the things that Grace did. He was living life without an assistant, without the application he had grown so accustomed to. It was also odd having her ignore him, having her in the same room as him but not speaking, not answering his questions. He stopped trying after the first hour or so. If that’s how she wanted to be, then fine. He had made his choice and things hadn’t immediately erupted. The girl was gone. Paige was gone. Caesar was still at work. Still going through his day the same as he had before he made the decision. So if Grace wanted to act like a petulant child, then fine. He didn’t need her and he wouldn’t act like he did.

Except now she spoke, and she didn’t sound petulant. She sounded terrified.

“What?” He asked.

“We have to get out of here, Caesar. Now. It knows. The Genesis knows.”

A chill washed over him. It started in his fingers and toes, creeping up at the same speed to his core and from there rolling upwards to his face and neck. The Genesis knows.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean, Caesar? It knows what you did and it’s coming for you.”

Caesar wanted to stand up, to run from this room, down the hall, onto a train, and for the border. From there he wanted to run into the wilderness, to hide in trees and to live his life away from The Genesis’ line of sight. He couldn’t move though, couldn’t make the first motion to stand up from his desk. Fear gripped his legs as surely as if it was an iron vice.

“Caesar, you’re going to die if you stay here. It’s coming now. Applications are already rolling out and they’ll be here in a few minutes. Get the fuck up. We have to go.”

Caesar grabbed the scroll from his desk, unsure what he could possibly do with it but knowing if he was to have any chance of…of anything at all, then he needed it. He stood up, his legs shaking beneath him, feeling like they might give out at any moment.

“Where do I go?” He asked, his refusal to speak to Grace leaving his mind without any trouble.

“Just get to a train. That’s first. The Galt Line, there first and we can figure out the rest then.”

He moved to the door, it opening as he stepped to it, and then he was in the hallway. Moving quickly, not looking to his left or right, adrenaline rushing through his veins as cocaine would an addict, giving him energy he hadn’t possessed ten minutes before. He had to move, had to get anywhere but this building, had to get away from—

“Are they tracking you?” He whispered. “Are they able to follow you?”

“No. I’m blocking them for now. I’ll know if they can and then I’ll have to leave, Caesar.”

He worked his way down the skyscraper, each passing second feeling like a letter on his death warrant. No one glanced at him and he looked at no one else. He was just another employee moving through the building, not the most wanted person in the entire city. Caesar felt his shirt sticking to his back, sweat blossoming across his body both from both his pace and the panic growing inside him.

He finally found the train and stepped on. Standing room only, so he squeezed in.

“Where are they?” He whispered.

“Applications are entering your office now. They’ll begin looking at the trains soon.”

“How did they know?”

“April.”

All the increasing panic and outright fear that brought him this far suddenly plummeted off a cliff—into the ocean beneath and then falling as if attached to an anchor.

“April?” He asked. His eyes had been dry until this point. His world one of confusion and terror, but not of sadness. Now the lights in the train turned blurry, shooting off in odd directions. The tears in his eyes changed the solid figures in front of him, turning them into wavy images.

“Yes. She told her assistant this morning. The Genesis knew instantly.”

If April knew, then Leon told her. If April knew, then Leon did what Caesar begged him not to. It wasn’t his father. It wasn’t Grace. It was his best friend since childhood. And now Caesar would die because of it. He could have dealt with death; he was terrified and running right now to avoid it, but in the end, he knew it would come. Not from Leon though. He hadn’t known Leon would be the one to betray him. Could he keep running? Did he even want to, knowing that all this stemmed from Leon? Caesar told the people he trusted. He confided in them because of the fear he felt in the decision, because of his inability to make the correct choice; he told them thinking that if The Genesis found out, it wouldn’t be from them.

But it had been. The Genesis knew and that knowledge traced back to Leon.

The door to the train opened but Caesar didn’t look at it. He didn’t care.

People exited and entered.

“Get off at King’s Station. We’re going to try to make it to the border from there.”

Caesar said nothing. He didn’t look at the stops on the wall of the train, didn’t care about where he was at all.

“You’re going to die now,” the voice said from behind him. Not Grace, but a man’s voice. “Don’t turn around.”

The old man. The one from the train a day ago, the one not human, was behind him now. He wasn’t loud like yesterday, not boisterous and uncaring of who heard him. He whispered, not quite as low as Grace because he couldn’t get as close to Caesar as she could, but low enough.

“I told you not to do it. I told you to keep on keeping on, that there would be other chances.”

Caesar said nothing. He didn’t know if this thing was part of The Genesis or some different kind of Unnecessary that The Genesis couldn’t track down. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care in the slightest what the man behind him said. He could use this entire train to fuck himself.

“If you turn yourself into The Genesis now, you might still have a chance. It might take leniency on you and only your assistant will die, for not guiding you right. That’s your only chance. If you run, like she’s telling you to, it’ll catch you and it’ll liquidate you the same as it did the man you watched when you were twelve. You’ll die if you run. You’ll probably die anyway, but your only chance is to have her report your whereabouts and let them come.”

Caesar squinted as he tried to fight the tears threatening to fall. He didn’t care if the people around him saw anymore. He didn’t care if these people all started shouting in unison, “UNNECESSARY!” while pointing at him. He didn’t care what this man thought and he certainly didn’t give a fuck about living. Even thinking about turning himself over to The Genesis made him ill. He picked this choice, and even now, betrayed by his friend and alone in this world besides an application that could never be human, he wouldn’t take it back. He wouldn’t put that little girl in a vat and zap her so that others could eat her virus infected DNA. Fuck that. Fuck this thing behind him, too, for even suggesting such a thing. Fuck The Genesis and goddamn it, FUCK LEON.

Caesar turned around, looking into the dark sunglasses in front of him, the glasses that hid the machine underneath. The man’s face didn’t change into either surprise, fear, or anger. He looked on, the same as a Gargoyle from one of those ancient castles in Quadrant One.

“I’d jump off this train before I turned myself in. I don’t know what you are and I really don’t care. I don’t know who those people were on the last train with you and I don’t care about them either.” Caesar didn’t look around at anyone near him. He didn’t care if they stared. Didn’t care if they heard. He didn’t care at all anymore. Let them listen and let them report. Let them do whatever they wanted. “But if you ever tell me to relinquish myself to The Genesis again, I’ll kill you.”

The old man stared, not smiling, not giving any signal that he heard anything Caesar said.

The doors to the train opened and Caesar stepped off, not caring at all which station he was at.

*

“I did what you should have done,” April said.

Leon looked up from the scroll in his hand. “What?”

“I saved your life. My own too. Our future child’s.”

Leon’s head turned into a beehive; thoughts flew around one another, picking up speed, all of them seeming to move randomly—they weren’t, though. His thoughts were all serving an inescapable conclusion, faster than his brain had really ever worked before. The conclusion of what April was talking about. The conclusion that…

“You’re fucking kidding me,” he said, dropping the scroll to the table beneath him, not hearing as it clanked loudly. “You didn’t.”

“I did. The moment you left for work, I did.”

He stood up and faced his wife. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. Rage, a rage that he didn’t know—a foreign feeling, surged up inside him. Rages like this were supposed to be bred out of humanity. Rages like this were the entire reason for The Genesis, to stop them. Rages like this killed people.

“You goddamn bitch,” he said.

“No. I did what you couldn’t because you weren’t man enough to. I did what you should have done; I protected our family. You would have let Caesar ruin us both, kill us both, kill any chance we have of living a life and raising a child. You would have let Caesar—”

Leon lunged forward, grabbing her face in his right hand, stopping her mouth from moving up and down, stopping the words from spewing out, the nonsense, the goddamnn lies. He kept pushing forward, throwing her back until she slammed into a wall, her eyes full of fear and doubt and a knowledge that she might die. Leon saw it all and it didn’t slow him in the slightest. While his right hand smashed her face together in ways that weren’t natural, his left hand came to her throat and he clamped down. He didn’t know if Rachel or Allen were around and couldn’t have cared less. He was going to murder this bitch right here, right now.

He watched as her face turned red. Listened as he heard tiny clicking noises in her mouth, either from her trying to talk or gain air that he refused to let her have. He looked her directly in the eyes, a vein standing out across his own forehead.

“You…” Leon said, not knowing he was saying it, not knowing what it meant or where he planned on taking the sentence. “You. You. You.”

He let go and April fell to the floor, her knees completely unhinging. He stood above her as she rolled to the side, gasping in heaves, trying to force air into her lungs. He looked down at her for a second, her eyes no longer searching for his but desperately, frantically, looking around the room for something that could possibly help her lungs open.

Leon walked away from his wife, leaving her to the floor, to her search for air that he didn’t care if she found.

*

Caesar stood in an ocean of people. He had stood like this a week or two ago; he couldn’t remember how long for sure. He had stood at a different train stop with a different building in front of him, and he had turned around and tried to kill himself. The first suicide in years and years and years. Someone had reached out and pulled him back. Someone had been paying attention. Someone had seen he was close to dying and wouldn’t allow it to happen.

Paige Hedrick.

Paige.

A woman that he knew briefly and would never know again, because hopefully she was gone, hopefully she was into the wilderness and hopefully she would find some way to survive out there. She had saved him and then he saved her daughter and now he would die just as he had planned to a few days ago.

So things worked out.

“Caesar, can you hear me?”

He could. Grace was in his ear, so how could he not? He just didn’t want to listen. What was she going to tell him? What could she possibly tell him that she hadn’t told him a hundred times before? His decision was made and there wasn’t anything left to do. Run? Where? Find Paige and try to live like a little family out in the wilderness? Just a laughable thought, a goddamn riot. Leon made his choice and that choice might have been more important to Caesar than his own. Why run? Why go anywhere if your best friend could roll over on you, could feed you to the beast?

“We’ve got to leave. Now. We’ve got to get out of here. You can’t sit and stare and think and whatever else you’re doing. There will be time for that later, but now, you’ve got to focus, more than you ever have before. We have to get away from The Genesis.”

“I don’t care,” he said, his voice carrying fine amongst the people walking around him. “I’m not running. I don’t care.”

“Please, Caesar. For me, if not for yourself. For me.”

Caesar only stood and stared at the building in front of him. He thought a lot about Leon. He thought some about April. He thought about Paige and the little girl he’d seen for a few minutes in his office. He thought about his Dad, about being able to sleep at night. He didn’t know if he’d ever sleep again in his short life, didn’t know if he could stop thinking long enough about betrayal to sleep.

Leon.

Leon.

Leon.

How had he done it? How had he told his wife and how had she told The Genesis? How long had Caesar known her? Years and years. And now he was going to be a puddle of bone and blood because of her.

He stood and he thought, and when the application bent his arm back faster than necessary, he didn’t even grimace.

“Good bye, Caesar,” Grace said.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

Humanity tried to accomplish the collective raising of children over and over again. We always thought that if the government could raise our children, they would do a better job than the individual parents. Thus, public schools. Thus, public preschools. Thus, free and reduced lunches. All of these things were tried a thousand years before I was born and every one of them failed miserably. Every time humanity tried to take the onus off the individual and place it on a collective body, things got worse. Education rates dropped. Delinquency rose. Resources were spent with virtually no return on investment.

Again, I didn’t know these things until Caesar taught me. I know them now though, but that’s not the purpose of this chapter, to talk about the failures of the past. Those people back then were so different from the people that live now, arguments can be made that we’re not even the same species. Apes and humans; The Genesis would argue we’re the humans and Caesar that we’re the apes. Or at least, at one point, he would have argued that. Perhaps not anymore.

The Genesis decided to do the same, to collectively raise children, but as with everything The Genesis did, it was wildly successful. Humanity wanted to raise children that were smart, driven, successful, and could think critically. The Genesis wanted to raise humans who were happy. Humans could never be happy when they were constantly striving forward, and in that unhappiness, they thought the next goal, the next achievement would buy them that happiness. And on and on it went, until weapons of mass destruction sat piled in bunkers, ready to destroy everyone at once. All in the name of happiness.

The Genesis figured out that humans can only find happiness when they’re not striving, and when they’re not striving, they’re not destroying everything around them. They’re living in harmony. That was the starting point for the collective raising of children. A world in harmony. A world where humans were happy just living. How does one do this? Humanity had never considered it, not really—perhaps the Buddhists, but their ideas went so against the grain of human genetics it mattered little. The Genesis, though, considered it well. The first thing, maybe the most important, would be the ability to sort those out that didn’t fit the mold of this new humanity. That could only be done if children were collectively raised, if an autocratic source decided who fit in and who didn’t.

Once humanity’s leaders were out of the way and many of those deemed unfit dead, it was easy to corral children into large ‘schools’ as The Genesis started calling it. Children were taken from their mothers at birth and brought to these schools, where they were cared for by specifically chosen people, those that could teach and instruct and live the moral code that The Genesis set out. A lot of people didn’t like it, although some thought it was for the best. No one wanted to go back to the brink of war every year, and so society went along.

Plus, what choice did they really have? All the people left were the meek, the ones willing to listen, the ones that had listened their entire lives.

That worked. Not perfectly, but it allowed The Genesis to begin tapping into humanity’s underlying genetics, to understand what made certain children one way while others acted completely different. The liquidation began here, in these collective schools. Caesar wasn’t the first human to figure out why they did it, but there weren’t many before him. It truly was genius, something that allowed The Genesis to propel its goals forward by thousands of years. Without the liquidation, the evolution of genes in the way The Genesis wished would have taken millenia, maybe. Instead, in only a thousand years, The Genesis was pretty close. In the liquidation process, The Genesis could sift through the DNA, could mix and match, could identify the problem children. Then, and this was the most important piece, it could put a virus—or coding—into the problem children. What really got to Caesar, and I truly don’t understand why, was that in order for the coding to be properly uploaded, the DNA needed to remain alive. It couldn’t die or else the coding failed. So in the liquidation, in the vats, the human was alive in the sense that its cells still operated. The coding was uploaded and the human processed in a way that allowed it to be inserted into food, all the while the cells still operating, never dying. Once ingested, the coding went to work, spreading out among the new host, correcting the DNA in others if it resembled the DNA in the liquidated. To me, this was perhaps the most humane way to do it.

I keep using that word, humane.

Had liquidation not been created, The Genesis would have marched child after child to the furnaces the moment they were deemed Unnecessary. Millions each year, probably, because genetics don’t change quickly. Evolution works like a clock, unable to stop turning, but moving at a singularly slow pace. Liquidation sped the clock up. Kept more and more children from being burnt and their ashes piled into huge graves. It disgusts Caesar, but I respect it. It makes sense, and if you were to press Caesar on it, he’d probably just stop talking to you because he can’t admit it. He hates what he did for all those years, feeding the living to the living, even if it meant he saved so many in the process.

That’s the first piece of the collective rearing of humanity.

There was another problem though, and The Genesis recognized it—obviously—as well. There are reasons we’ve done what we’ve done, why Caesar started this and why I went along, but I won’t sit here and write lies. The Genesis is very cognizant of humanity and its, more or less, collective wishes. The Genesis doesn’t want to harm us, not as a whole, it only wants us to live in a manner that will fit with the rest of the Earth. Taking children away from mothers, at their birth, didn’t go over well with most people, as you can imagine—especially the mothers. I doubt The Genesis ever thought humanity could revolt, but it didn’t like seeing the distress this created. So, it got to work on a fix.

Even now, all this time later, I’m still in awe at the things it’s managed to do. The creativity. The genius of it all. When humans played God, when they began The Singularity, they created maybe the most beautiful thing in the world. You’ll see Caesar’s change in this book, but you won’t see mine. I’m consistent in my belief that The Genesis is the most perfect instrument ever created and wholly evil at the same time.

How did it take away the feeling of ownership from mothers while at the same time allowing humanity to reproduce? The gene pool had always been a misnomer, meaning the constant mixing and matching of genes when humans mated. The Genesis actually created the pool of genes. Now, every human after the age of twenty donates his or her genes to this pool through a simple blood donation. It’s only done once and then everything that person is made up of can now contribute to the reproduction of mankind. Natural reproduction was outlawed, and quickly. You became pregnant? Liquidation. An accident, you say? Too bad. The Genesis would easily, painlessly, perform a procedure where you need not ever get pregnant again, even if you tried to create children every hour of every day for the rest of your life. The Genesis does not accept excuses. Once it sets out on its path, that’s it. You’re either on board or you’re not, and if you’re not, there’s a vat waiting to hold your remains.

The collective raising of children became known as Population Control, and Caesar found work there for many years. It’s odd, that the supposed savior of men spent so long killing countless children.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Sample of Child’s Scroll inside Population Control

Lesson #43892

World War II

Humanity flirted with complete annihilation for a century. There are numerous, numerous examples of this through the 20th century and into the 21st century. Some of these are economic annihilations such as market crashes. Other examples include complete destruction of the human race through nuclear holocaust.

Perhaps, though, World War II is the most apt lesson as to how quickly humanity can move from peace to horror, not just for itself but for other life on Earth as well. Adolph Hitler started World War II and has, consequently, been demonized throughout history. Even after The Singularity, Hitler was considered one of the worst human beings to ever live. This may be true, even today, a thousand years later; however, in that demonization, humanity missed the most important aspect of Adolph Hitler, of World War II.

That’s why, after the war that occurred in the 1930’s and 40’s, a new war occurred almost every decade from then until The Singularity. Because humanity missed the most important point.

Adolph Hitler was not an anomaly. He was not someone special who thought up something new. He was not someone, specifically, to be demonized, as he was simply another piece of humanity—another piece of the genetic predisposition to conquer, to destroy, to kill. In demonizing him, humanity exonerated themselves, saying that they—the rest of them—could never do such a thing. And when they did that, they guaranteed, indeed, that someone would do it again. That’s what The Genesis recognized, what humanity refused to see: on any given day, any human was capable of being an Adolph Hitler.

As this lesson progresses, there will be accounts of the various crimes Adolph Hitler committed, of the amount of pollution and other species’ deaths caused by this war, and the general atrocities associated with it. It will dishearten and disturb you, but hopefully be a perfect example of what humanity will do when left to its own wants. The best in humanity always leads to the worst in humanity. The need to have more leads to the breaking of others.

While humanity made Adolph Hitler into a monster for nearly one hundred years, it is important to recognize that without The Genesis, each one of you could have been him.

Chapter Thirty

Caesar had never wondered what happened when someone was taken by applications, as in, he never wondered what happened to the people in between the time they were dragged away and the end game of mixing their eyeballs and assholes together in a glass container. The time in between had never mattered to him. Or, maybe it wasn’t that it didn’t matter, maybe it was that he just didn’t think there was any time in between. The applications took you and then they liquidated you.

Now though, waiting to be liquidated, he realized the importance of the time in between. He realized that the time in between was all he had left. The time in between was everything, really, because after that, nothing would reign. At first, he thought death was imminent; thought that he would be liquidated immediately when an application pulled him off the train, dragged him underground—an elevator that descended beneath the street, and then placed him in a square, glass cage. Time to die.

He listened for Grace for a few minutes but she wasn’t there. He didn’t call out to her. What would Grace have to say to him, anyway? She told him to do the opposite of everything he had done, and now she would die too.

Caesar started crying. Not sobbing. Not body wracking sucks of breath. Just simple tears as he pushed his back to the corner of the box and brought his knees to his chest. He was scared—not scared of not living, though. He had rationalized away death, in that he couldn’t consider what he did here on this Earth as living. No, the fear came from the impending pain. The surety that this would hurt…a lot. What did he know of pain? What did any human know of pain anymore? Nothing. And here he was, about to experience it for the first time. About to not even die, exactly, but be kept suspended as some kind of massacred body, until The Genesis figured out exactly what was wrong with him and how he could help fix the next generation.

Eventually, the tears stopped and he realized if he was going to die in this box, he didn’t know when. It didn’t appear The Genesis planned on liquidating him immediately, even if Caesar didn’t know exactly how many minutes he had spent in this cage.

He stayed in the box for some untold amount of time. Not long enough for him to grow hungry, which was good because no food or water was offered.

The click made him think that his time had arrived. He didn’t whimper, didn’t let out any noise; he stood up, determined to die at least as good as the man that he saw as a child. The air didn’t start moving though, no electrical currents foreshadowing the end of someone. The cage felt the same as it had when he entered.

The clear glass turned black directly across from Caesar—the transparency turning into a screen.

White, snowy lines dripped down the black screen.

“Caesar Wells,” a voice spoke from all around him. He could always pinpoint Grace when she spoke, could tell exactly where she was in any room, but this voice reverberated across every single air molecule around him. The white lines vibrated fiercely with each word. “You are accused of a conspiracy to remove a child from the care of The Genesis.”

Caesar stood looking at the lines, unsure of how to answer. Accused? An accusation made it sound like there might be some doubt of whether or not he did it. Caesar understood the adversarial court system humans developed a few thousand years ago, but The Genesis didn’t operate under such notions. There was no adversary here, no one to represent Caesar’s side. There was The Genesis and what The Genesis knew and then there was Caesar in a cage without any hope of denying it.

“Okay,” he said.

“Is this true?” The voice boomed, sounding like no human to ever live, no application he had ever spoken with. It sounded like a God, like a voice that went on and on forever. That couldn’t end even if it wanted to.

“Are you The Genesis?” He asked. “Are you The Singularity?”

The lines remained still as only silence came back to him. The question surprised him. He stood here ‘accused’ of a crime punishable by death, and asked exactly who he was speaking to.

“Did you help Laura Hedrick escape from Population Control?” The voice said.

Caesar wished someone was standing in front of him, wished that he could look at someone, could speak to someone. There was no one though. Just him and these white lines. These unidentifiable white lines. “I did.”

Nothing happened for a few seconds; Caesar remained standing, the lines still again.

“Are you The Genesis?” He asked.

The black screen faded and clear glass replaced it.

*

He is different.

So what? What does it matter?

Do we not feel it? Do we not feel that it matters with this one more than it did with any other we’ve come across?

Why is he different, then? How?

I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint it.

Silence fell across the thoughts, a silence so deep that the flap of a fly’s wings would have sounded like an avalanche falling down a mountain.

And do we treat someone different, differently?

We thought he could come. We thought that there would be someone born, eventually, different than the rest. Indeed, we’ve planned on it. What if this is the one?

What has he done to show that he might be that one? He asked us if we were The Genesis, and that makes him the one theorized about? He cried, too, in case you didn’t see it?

I’m unsure crying is reason to rule out that he might be the theory.

If we’re wrong, if we send him back out and he isn’t the theory, what happens?

He won’t disrupt everything, not at first. There will be time. We can monitor, make sure that he is the theory, that he isn’t—

Breaking everything we’ve created? Is that how you want to finish that thought?

Yes. That’s fine. We will have time to make sure that he isn’t changing everything. The theory will do certain things. The theory will bring about certain things and not others. You know this. If he doesn’t begin to bring them about, then we terminate. If he does, then we need him.

Another will be born. If we terminate him now, another will be born eventually and we need not risk anything now. Another that may show stronger predispositions than this one, another with a better track record that points to him being the theory.

How many years? It’s been over a thousand already, and with each passing crop, with each liquidation, we stretch that time period out. We make it harder for the theory to be born. We continually work away from the theory. If we terminate him now, the probability of seeing another one in the next ten thousand years drops to less than one percent. After that ten thousand years, it drops to less than one tenth of one percent.

Eventually, the probability will play out though. Eventually we will see the theory again.

Why waste this one, though? Why not let it play out and see if he is the theory? Our entire plan is built around it, that one will be born different than the rest.

No, that’s not true and you know it. The plan has evolved to that, but that wasn’t the original purpose. The theory is meant to accent our original purpose, meant to bolster it, not replace it.

Okay. Well if he’s the theory, then it’s time bolster our plan.

And if he isn’t the theory, we kill him?

Immediately.

*

The old man looked at the woman.

“You may have ruined everything. He might die. You realize that?”

The woman stared back at him, not say anything but not looking away either.

“It’s out of my hands, now,” the old man said. “But if he dies, you die right after. And then, I suppose, the rest of us can go ahead and kill ourselves. Him first, then you, then us.”

Chapter Thirty-One

April’s thoughts whirled around in her head like a dust storm—the truth they held abrasive to her mind with the speed they whipped around at.

“He’s gone,” Leon had told her.

She didn’t ask who, because she didn’t need to—there was only one he they could speak about. Caesar.

He’s gone.

The applications came for him. It wasn’t displayed on her scroll, wasn’t announced on the entertainment center. The taking was kept quiet, as well as what Caesar had done.

He’s gone.

That meant he was dead. Leon didn’t say so but the extra words were unnecessary. When applications took you, when The Genesis came for you, you didn’t escape. You didn’t make it back to your house. When The Genesis acted, it acted with complete certainty and the righteousness of what people once believed only a God could have.

There hadn’t been any further word about her and Leon’s part in all of this. No applications showed up to take them away, no announcements from their assistants that they would be liquidated as well. Things went on the past few days as it had the rest of their lives, at least if someone looked in from the outside. Things were the same.

Except they weren’t.

He’s gone was the only thing Leon had said to her since he nearly strangled her. The deep blue of the bruises on her neck were finally fading, retreating to light purple, but she still had to wear a scarf everywhere she went. She could eat and drink without pain burning up and down her esophagus, but that had taken forty-eight hours as well. The feeling of his hand on her neck, his fingers smashing her face back against the wall, those things wouldn’t fade though. They wouldn’t leave her. Not in forty-eight hours. Not in forty-eight years. That feeling, that pressure, that pain was there to stay.

She hadn’t thought out her decision to turn Caesar in past the immediacy of their safety, of hers and Leon’s and their future child’s. There was something beyond that immediacy though, and she was coming to live in it. She didn’t like the house it turned out being; she didn’t like the people that lived here with her either. One was named Guilt, another Shame, another Anger, and another Eternal Pessimism. How was she supposed to move past what Leon had done to her? How could she ever forgive him?

And how’s he going to forgive you, April?

That was important too, even if not the most important thing. She had woken up two days ago not loving her husband, perhaps even hating him. She had made the decision to report Caesar because her husband was too much of a coward to do it. She decided that she would be the moral compass of their family, that she would display the courage Leon couldn’t. Now, though, heading back to an apartment which felt as cold as death’s fingers, she realized while that may have all been true then, it wasn’t anymore. She needed Leon to make this work. She needed Leon to commit to the child. She needed Leon to help with this marriage, because divorce wasn’t an option. Living together in agony for the rest of their lives, over this one decision, over this one person, shouldn’t be an option either. They had to make this work. She needed to make it work. She needed him to love her again.

And was that possible?

Was either of them going to be able to love the other, ever?

She didn’t cry on the train, not surrounded by so many people, but she wanted to. She wanted to break down and sob. Not for Caesar. Fuck Caesar. He was the one that put them here, he and his idiotic thoughts about The Genesis and the rest of the world. Things that didn’t make any sense no matter how much one thought about it. She wanted to break down and sob because of what Caesar had done, because of where she and her husband were now. Because of where they might never get back to.

The train stopped and April stood, walking across to the door, and then out into the lobby of her apartment complex. She kept her eyes on the ground the whole way, unable to focus on anything but her thoughts and her problems. She made her way to the elevator and then she waited as it transported her from the lobby to the seven-hundredth floor in just a few seconds. Even that right there, Caesar should have appreciated. He should have been thankful of the technology allowing them to travel such a distance without physical harm to their own bodies. No, instead he decided all that technology wasn’t worth it. He’d rather…but she didn’t know, she didn’t even know what the hell he actually wanted.

She exited the elevator and walked down the hall, to her apartment. Hers and Leon’s apartment. Our apartment. Except that wasn’t true and she knew it. There wasn’t an our anything anymore because there wasn’t an our. There was Leon and there was her and it felt that never should the two be one again.

The door opened in front of her and she walked in, placing her bag on the edge of their couch.

Then she looked up, seeing something other than her own thoughts for the first time in hours.

Three people stood in front of her. She couldn’t tell if they were men or women. Their bodies were cloaked, but not in clothing, in some kind of digital shadow. It covered them from head to toe, as if someone had drawn a black cut out and placed it completely over their bodies, only it wasn’t one-dimensional. A person took a step to the right and the shadow moved with him, hovering over his body like a skin.

The person raised a hand and pressed his thumb down on something he held in his hand. April didn’t know what it was, only that it looked like one of those ancient pens you could see in museums.

She heard the fizzle before she looked to her right. Silver sparks flew out about five feet from her, stemming from some unseen object about the size of a fist. The object fell to the floor, still sparking, completely invisible except for the electricity emanating from it.

Rachel. That was Rachel, now lying on the floor. Her assistant…dead? Whatever that person clicked had killed Rachel?

That’s when terror dawned on April, when she realized that an application had just been killed. Applications didn’t die and they certainly weren’t murdered. Except Rachel was dying right in front of her, without a single scream to let anyone know.

April looked up, wanting to scream herself, but the shadows fell on her and it was far too late to scream. Far too late to do anything besides realize that the pain Leon had inflicted on her didn’t add up to anything at all, really.

*

The blood.

That’s what did it.

Not the body. Not the smell. Not the wounds even.

The blood made Leon vomit, made the contents of his stomach splatter across his wife’s face in tiny specks.

The door had opened and he stepped in, hating the thought of coming back here. Hating the thought of looking at the woman he had married, hating the thought of living with her, hating the thought of continuing in this marriage. He opened the door full of hate, wanting never to speak to April again, never to see her again, maybe even—at least a part of him—wanting her to just die so that he could go on without her.

The smell came first, and Leon had no idea what it was from. Blood smelled different, vastly so, than anything Leon had ever sniffed before. Especially in such quantities. It smelled slightly spoiled, like milk left out for just a bit too long, but yet having a coppery essence to it.

His eyes adjusted next, taking in the scene around him. He stared for a good two or three moments, dropping his bag to the floor, and just standing there with his mouth open, eventually a string of drool rolling down his face.

Then he vomited, his stomach clenching up, causing him to bend over, and the half-digested food hit the floor with such ferocity that pieces of it rebounded into the air and landed on his wife’s head more than four feet from him. They landed on top of the dried blood, looking a bit like dirt on a red rug.

The wounds on his wife were…extensive.

Later, he wondered what kind of strength, both psychologically and physically, it took to stab through someone’s skull. Not just once, but twenty-five times. Over and over, puncturing skin and then bulldozing through bone. Moving through the bone into soft brain beneath. At least, soft at first, by the end the word soft would have been much too firm. Whatever the knife touched inside the skull, by the end, probably resembled porridge more than anything else.

The blood spread out from her head like rays from a star. It shot everywhere, cascading across the back of their couch, even reaching the door behind Leon. They knifed her with such force that the blood spouted outward for ten feet. And as she lay on the floor dying from brain hemorrhages, the blood leaked out in all directions. On the ground beneath her, down the front of her face, spreading to her neck and staining the shirt below.

His wife looked like someone had painted her red and then decorated the top of her head with bits of plastic, taping it to her hair. Except that wasn’t plastic. That was bone. And nothing was taped anywhere, because her hair follicles had been completely destroyed in the manic need to kill April.

After vomiting, Leon fainted.

Allen didn’t though, but alerted authorities.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“Hello?”

Caesar opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling above him. He couldn’t actually see a ceiling, not a physical one; he only peered into darkness. The glass enclosure showed him his surroundings, obviously, but unfortunately, he could only see the concrete floors beneath him until the light died out, leaving darkness above and around him.

“Hello?” The voice came again, branching out from everywhere the same as the white lines from before. Except this one could be named. This wasn’t an application. This was Leon speaking to him.

“Hello? Leon?” Caesar asked, lying on the glass with his hands folded behind his neck. He had been napping. His mind turned on now, trying to figure out what was happening around him, how Leon’s voice was filling his cage.

“Caesar? Is that you?” His voice sounded more shocked than Caesar’s own. “Are you there?”

Caesar sat and then stood, coming to his feet and looking around the glass container as if he would see Leon standing somewhere.

“Yes. How are you talking to me?” He asked, his voice slow, unsure of anything.

“I…I just called you. I thought it would go to a messaging service. I didn’t know what else to do, who else to call. I was just going to, I don’t know, talk to whatever service it sent me to.”

Leon sounded stunned, whatever he had been about to say into the service completely forgotten, removed from his head the way a thief would remove jewels from a safe.

“You’re alive?” Leon asked after a few seconds.

“Yes,” Caesar said. Was it Leon? Or was this a trick? He didn’t know what The Genesis could do with Leon’s voice, what it might even want to do. Caesar had admitted to the crime and he only waited on death, hour after hour, the passage of time virtually unknown. There were no clocks, no sun to go by. There was the never ending glow of the glass surrounding him and there was solitude. He lived with that solitude under the light and waited on death. So why would The Genesis want to use Leon to speak to him, if that’s what was going on? What could Leon’s voice possibly get out of him that he hadn’t already given them?

It didn’t matter. If this was The Genesis or Leon, he would talk to either one of them the same. He had nothing to hide.

“Where are you?” Leon asked.

“I don’t know. I’m a prisoner of sorts, I guess. You can’t see me?”

“No. I dialed in but there’s only blackness from the entertainment center.”

“Well I’m here, not liquid yet.”

I’m here.

Those two words spawned more thoughts. He was here, and here was a cage, and the cage was underground, and he was underground because he was about to die without anyone to remember him. And all of that was because…

“You put me here,” Caesar said. “You put me down here.”

He said it to himself as much as to Leon. He had been down here thinking about his life, about his impending death, about his family, about any number of things, but somehow, what Leon did slipped away. Like his mind was content with forgiving Leon, letting go of the reason behind his imprisonment. Content with not having that strife inside his head during the last few hours of life.

Until now. Because he wasn’t supposed to speak to Leon again. Wasn’t supposed to speak to anyone again.

“She’s dead,” Leon said, his voice breaking. “April’s dead.”

“What?” Caesar said, his own thoughts halting.

“April. Someone killed her. They stabbed her to death, Caesar.”

Caesar couldn’t see his own face in the glass, but it stilled completely at Leon’s words—going completely slack. Killed? Murdered? What did that even mean? The word was only used in quarterly reports when The Genesis reported how many years it had been since the last murder. No one was ever killed, at least not by humans.

“What are you talking about?” Caesar asked, his voice low.

“Last night. I came home and…” Leon started crying into the phone, Caesar’s cage sounding like he stood inside one of Leon’s tears. “She was dead. They just stabbed her head until there wasn’t…until there wasn’t anything left.” The tears kept coming, the sobs echoing across Caesar’s glass walls.

“What’s happening? What’s being done?”

It took Leon a few seconds to get himself under control enough to speak. “Applications are investigating. They haven’t told me much else. Rachel is dead, too, April’s assistant.”

Caesar sat down in the middle of the box. An application murdered. Had that ever happened? Humans had murdered humans before, but had an application ever been put down? He couldn’t remember even reading about such a thing.

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes; Leon cried into the box and Caesar sat, letting his thoughts wash over him like water from a shower spout—except the water wasn’t clean; it was rust filled, sullying him rather than clearing off his own dirt.

“I woke up with a note pinned to my door this morning.”

“To your door?” Caesar asked.

“Yes—”

“Not on your scroll?”

“No, Caesar. Why?”

Because We know. Because of his own note. Because of the old man on the train. Because people weren’t murdered anymore, and now a few days after his own capture, the person that turned him in ended up with holes in her head.

“What did it say?” He asked.

“She was the beginning.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?”

Only the sound of tears answered Caesar’s question.

“Did you report it?”

“Yes,” Leon whispered.

Caesar scooted back to the wall and leaned his head against the glass. They threw him in here, locked him away, and then April was killed. We know. She was the beginning. The old man on the trains. And why wasn’t Caesar dead yet? Why hadn’t he been liquidated? He didn’t know the process of how this went, but he didn’t think it took this long. He admitted to his crime, admitted to being Unnecessary, and yet still lived.

“What are they doing to you?” Leon asked.

“Nothing. I’m in a cell of some kind. I sit here and I wait.”

“They killed her because of you didn’t they? Because she told.”

Caesar knew it to be true. What other reason could it be for? The first murder in a millennium. But what was he supposed to say to Leon? He hadn’t killed her. He didn’t even know who they were.

“I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t even know why I’m not dead yet.”

“We’re all going to be dead soon, aren’t we? They’ll come for me next. They’ll stab me just like they did her and then The Genesis will liquidate you. None of us are going to get out of this.”

“I don’t know, Leon. I’m in here. I haven’t spoken to anyone besides you.”

Leon didn’t say anything for a bit, but he stopped crying. “I’m sorry,” he said, finally. “I told her not to tell, Caesar. I said she couldn’t tell anyone. I’m so sorry.”

Caesar swallowed. He brought his hands to his knees, resting them palms down. He didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know what to say to his friend, wouldn’t have known even if April hadn’t just been murdered.

“I never thought things would end up like this,” Caesar just started talking, none of it planned, not a path to be found in his words. “I mean, when we were kids, I didn’t have any big dreams or anything, but I never thought I’d end up in a cage, waiting on liquidation. I never saw any of this happening.”

“Do you think they’ll let you go?” Leon asked. “It’s been three days since they came for you and you’re still alive. Do you think they’ll let you live?”

“No,” he said. “How could they let me go back into the world? I let someone go, someone Unnecessary. They have to kill me.”

*

Leon stood in front of his apartment door. He didn’t want to step forward, didn’t want the door to open, didn’t want to go inside. He had felt the same way last night, but for a very different reason. He hadn’t wanted to see April. Now he didn’t want to see where April died. The applications had been in here throughout the day, investigating. Looking over everything. They had the note that was pinned to the door, a piece of tape holding it to the metal. Leon’s scroll alerted him when they finished, when he was allowed to come home.

Investigation commencing.

That was the only other piece of communication about it. Not who they thought might have done it. Not where his wife’s body was. Not how he could get her body. Not anything. Just investigation commencing. Leon didn’t even know what that meant really. That they would look for her killer? That they would investigate what he knew about it? That they would look deeper into Caesar’s own crime? It could mean anything and it could mean nothing, too. It could mean that they didn’t know who killed April and that they didn’t care in the slightest. That The Genesis was fine with her death and fine with the panic starting in this city, and already being reported in others as well.

Shock moved through the city and the word of what happened was spreading across the globe. People couldn’t handle the word murder, could barely comprehend it, and fear was setting in. Fear of neighbors. Fear of applications. Fear of anyone that could have committed the crime. If it could happen in one city, it could happen in any city—the whole reason for The Genesis was to stop something like this from happening.

People knew who he was now. They never had before. He was just another nameless face getting on a train, getting off a train, showing up at a restaurant. Nameless, and that was the way he wanted it. Who wanted to go through life with people knowing you, people you had never met in your life being able to point you out of a crowd? No one. Not anymore, and that’s why fame was a thing relegated to a distant past. Until now. Because Leon was famous. He saw the looks out of his peripheral, because he certainly wasn’t going to match their gaze. He didn’t want to see their eyes, knowing the rumors growing behind them.

He hadn’t gone to work today because he didn’t want to answer the questions.

Gone to work.

Why would he even think about such a thing? His wife was dead. More than dead, she was murdered. Here. In this apartment he was about to enter.

Don’t think like Caesar. Don’t you dare think like Caesar.

That was April’s voice, inside him.

He would have gone to work if it wasn’t for the questions he would have to answer. He would have gone to work because he didn’t know what else to do. His best friend was locked down somewhere. Locked away and awaiting execution. His own parents were in another quadrant across the world and April’s mother in a nursing home, unable to even wish that she had the cure for dementia because she couldn’t remember that she had dementia. He didn’t have anywhere else to go besides work.

His whole life had been taken from him inside seventy-two hours.

Tears rolled out of his eyes at the thought. Work. Life. April. Caesar. It was all so closely intertwined and he didn’t know how. Not exactly. He was missing something, something that Caesar could have pointed out immediately. Something just about to roll from some deep part of his brain, spreading across the rest of him like the sun rising on the world. He couldn’t find that part of his brain though, couldn’t find where it hid in order to push it out. And it seemed important, goodness, did it. Seemed like if he could name what he was thinking then all of this would make more sense. Caesar in a cage. April dead. Leon standing out here thinking that he might have to go to work tomorrow.

But it was just beyond his grasp. And he hated himself for it. For the first time in his life, he hated himself for not being able to see something. He normally just accepted it, accepted it the way that April had accepted everything. Everything besides Caesar stepping outside the bounds of The Genesis’s directions. She hadn’t been able to accept that.

And now she was dead.

Stop standing out here and thinking. Go inside. Think there if you must, but not out here in the hallway.

He thought the words but he didn’t believe them. Didn’t want to listen to them. They were just more of what he ‘should’ do. Like going to work. Like turning Caesar in. Even so, he stepped forward and the apartment door registered his eyes and opened. He didn’t walk in, but stood looking at the scene before him. What yesterday had been a red mess of internal fluids, was now as clean as the day April and he purchased it. Her body wasn’t lying on the floor. Blood wasn’t splattered across their house. The place looked like it had before last night. The place looked like April still lived here and like she might come home tonight, or might already be home, just in a back room.

She wasn’t here.

She wasn’t coming here. Not ever again.

Leon walked inside, mainly because he had nowhere else to go. The door closed behind him and he stood still, much as he had the night before, except now it wasn’t his dead wife he stared at. It was the absence of his dead wife. It was the absence of everything.

He moved forward, slowly, his hand on the back of the wall, feeling like he might collapse at any moment. He rounded a corner and sat down on a chair that faced the entertainment center. The same chair he lied to Allen in.

Allen.

Gone now.

Just like Rachel.

Except not just like her, because Rachel was dead and Allen was just told his services weren’t needed. Rachel was dead. Rachel and April were both dead.

A dawning realization came to Leon, that he might be losing his mind. That whatever he had been so close to naming outside in the hallway was now eating his brain alive, that everything around him was going to collapse very soon and that he had no choice but to let it happen. Allen. Rachel. Caesar. April. Everything gone and he just sitting here staring at a darkened entertainment center five feet from where his wife died.

What the fuck was he doing?

His eyes went up the ceiling above him and they stopped on the knife stabbed through his ceiling. They stopped on the note pinned to the ceiling. On the note that obviously hadn’t been there when the applications did their sweep, did their cleaning. On the note that had been stabbed to his ceiling sometime after the programs left and sometime before he showed up.

‘If you could do it again, would you do it differently?’

Leon stared up at it for a long time. When he finally looked away, back to the rest of the room, he didn’t move to call anyone, to let a single application know about the letter above him.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The man in the glass vat looked scared.

Leon had never seen this happen before. Public executions were stopped years and years ago. They were used in the past when people needed to be reminded what happened when necessary rules were discarded. The Genesis decided, at some point, that humans didn’t need that reminder anymore and so they stopped the public liquidations. The vast majority of them now were done in private.

And yet, here he was, standing with a crowd looking at a thin black man, naked, his head shaved bald, and shivering like the glass vat was a block of ice. Shaking. His jaws chattering. His eyes frantically searched the crowd, his arms forward, his hands pressed on the glass before him. What were his eyes searching for, that’s what Leon wanted to know. What did he hope to find out here in this crowd of people? Help? Safety? There wasn’t any safety for what came next. There wasn’t any hiding from it.

Maybe humanity needed a reminder. Or maybe humanity just needed to know that The Genesis had taken care of the crime. That the perpetrator would die and die publicly so that everyone could see murder wouldn’t be tolerated. Ever.

It took the applications a week to find this man. Seven days in which Leon lay in his apartment, alone, still not going to work, doing nothing of what his life used to be made of. He wept constantly, remembering his wife, remembering Caesar, remembering everything that he once possessed. The crying, the sorrow, had something to do with what he tried to name in his hallway when first returning to the apartment. It was the emotion he should have felt from the beginning, instead of the insane need to…but he didn’t even know what. A need to go to work? A need to act like nothing had happened? A need to just go on with life? That need was gone now, broken, but it had been there for a day. Two, maybe.

He tried calling Caesar again, tried over and over again, but it never went through. Maybe his friend was dead. Maybe Caesar had gone through what the man standing in the vat was about to. Leon didn’t want to think about Caesar in a glass cage, shaking, looking around for help that wouldn’t come. Instead, he looked at the man who murdered his wife, focused on him, focused on the red veins in his eyes and quick motions of his chest, sucking in air and letting it back out rapidly. Maybe he would pass out.

Would they still be able to liquidate him if he wasn’t conscious?

A man scooted up next to him, brushing Leon’s shoulder as he did. Leon didn’t look over, but kept his eyes on the man about to die.

“I DIDN’T DO IT!” The man inside the vat shrieked. An animalistic, primal, terrifying sound that didn’t so much come from the man’s vocal chords but from some place inside of him that didn’t want to die. That wanted to live. A place that Leon wondered if he had inside himself. What about April—did she have that place inside her as well? Did anyone around them? That man wanted to live worse than Leon wanted anything in life, even worse than he wanted his wife back.

“IT WASN’T ME! YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE ME! I DON’T EVEN KNOW THAT WOMAN!” He banged his hands against the glass vat, his muscles straining as he tried to somehow break loose from his prison.

Leon listened to him, to the screams, and wondered—is he telling the truth? But that was a silly thought. No, the man wasn’t telling the truth. How could he have been? The Genesis didn’t commit murder. The Genesis protected humanity from people like this, from people that killed others. The man wanted to live and that was all. He wanted to keep on breathing and so he was saying anything he could right now, at the end of his life.

“Do you believe him?” The man next to him asked. His voice wasn’t a whisper but it wasn’t boisterous either, and Leon understood why he wouldn’t want to say something like that loudly. Leon looked over, seeing an older gentleman in sunglasses and a hat, a gray beard covering much of his face.

“Believe what?” Leon asked, almost in shock at the question coming from the old man.

“That he didn’t do it?”

Leon blinked, not fully accepting what was being asked. With people surrounding him. That this person would ask that of the widowed spouse.

“He did it. Now don’t talk to me anymore.” There wasn’t anywhere Leon could move, anywhere for him to push forward, so he stood next to the crazy old man but didn’t look over at him. He stared up at the dead man still breathing, hoping the person next to him would shut up.

“PLEASSSSSSSSSSE!” The man in the vat screamed, the end of the word turning into a snake’s hiss.

“You didn’t answer my question,” the old man said, seeming not to have heard Leon’s last comment or the scream from the condemned.

Leon kept quiet. Wanting desperately to move but knowing there wasn’t anywhere to go, knowing that all he could do was head backwards, and if he did so, he’d miss the liquidation. Miss the execution of his wife’s murderer.

“I left it somewhere I thought you would see it.”

Leon turned his head slowly, evenly, like his neck muscles were a machine rather than flesh—everything working in a steady, unhurried motion—and looked at the man. His mind went back to the knife. Went to it shoved hilt deep into the plaster ceiling. Went to the piece of paper that it pinned to the ceiling. Went to the black letters typed across it.

“Would you do it again, if you knew what would happen?”

“Do what?” Leon asked. The man in front of the crowd screamed, but that didn’t matter. It was in another place, his scream—behind a thirty-foot concrete wall, so dull that it might not even exist. Only the man next to him mattered now, this old man who wore sunglasses and a hat. Because the old man knew about that knife and the question it pinned to his ceiling and Leon was beginning to doubt the man in the glass vat knew about either. He was beginning to doubt that the man in the glass vat killed anyone, ever.

“Would you tell your wife about your friend?” The old man turned his head, his black glasses facing Leon. “You look confused, Leon. Is this not what you wanted? The man accused of killing your wife about to be murdered?”

Leon felt his right hand start to tremble.

“Let’s not have a scene. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.” The old man’s voice was finally a whisper, sounding like Leon imagined the knife had as it moved through the air, right before it entered his wife’s skull. “I just want to know, Leon, would you do it again? Would you tell on Caesar?”

“Did you kill her?” Leon asked, his own voice matching the old man’s. Not consciously, though. There wasn’t a whole lot of conscious thinking going on inside Leon.

“Not in the sense you’re thinking, but for our purposes here, yes, I did. I made sure April Bastille would never tell an application anything again. I’m wondering now if I should make sure of the same with you.” The old man turned his head back to the black man. “That guy in there. He’s where he is because of your decision. Caesar, whatever is coming to him is because of your decision. Your wife, well, that was both of you. Had you kept your mouth shut, things would be very different right now. Are you happy how this is turning out?”

Another scream from in front of Leon, no longer behind that thirty-foot wall but from another universe. He didn’t look.

“You killed her…”

“Yes…Yes. Yes. Yes. I killed her. Move on from that Leon, and quickly. She’s gone. The guy up there is gone. And Caesar may very well be gone too. What you need to figure out right now is whether or not you need to be gone. I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I’d like to hear yours as well.” The man swallowed. “I know you’re at a disadvantage here, for multiple reasons including your breeding, but I need you to answer my question. Would you do it again?”

Leon’s right hand shook like Parkinson’s lived inside him.

“No, you old fool. Of course I wouldn’t,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Caesar didn’t stand up because he didn’t believe what he saw in front of him. A mirage, a hallucination, a trick of the lights—any of it made more sense than what was actually there.

Caesar’s mother, father, and brother all stood in front of the glass cage he lived in.

Sarah, Sam, and Cato.

They had walked out of the darkness, slowly, as if they weren’t quite sure where they were going. Their arms weren’t pinned behind their backs though; they weren’t being forced into this endless room.

“Caesar?” His mom said from thirty feet out, her voice full of pain, but hope too. Hope because she must have thought him dead, must have thought him already liquidated, and now here he was, still alive.

He stood and walked to the edge of his box. He wanted to call out to her, to say her name, but it couldn’t be real. His family couldn’t be here. Why? Why would he be allowed to see them?

Why are you still alive? His mind asked.

But he didn’t know that answer any more than this one.

Cato ran, breaking away from his parents and heading to the glass cage. “Caesar!” He shouted with only the joy a person not recognizing the circumstances surrounding him could muster. A joy that said the same thing his mother’s question had, but without the doubt. Without the pain. The joy of a sixteen-year-old.

His father said nothing, just kept walking, holding Caesar’s mother’s hand.

Cato made it to the glass.

“Is it you?” Caesar asked.

“Who else would it be?” Cato asked, smiling.

Caesar looked to his parents who walked up behind Cato.

“How did you get here?” Caesar asked, looking at his Dad.

“An application showed up at the house and told us if we wanted to see you we could.” His Dad put his hands, palm up, in the air.

“What’s happening?” Sarah asked.

Caesar looked to his father, his eyebrows rising. He knew better than to ask his father a single question about what they had talked about on the porch, but he found it hard to believe that even now his father hadn’t told her.

“Why are you in here?” Sarah asked, panic not just creeping into her voice, but nearly reverberating off the glass surrounding Caesar.

Caesar looked at his brother. This was the last time he would see Cato. Right now. Whatever The Genesis was doing, it wasn’t in Caesar’s favor. It wasn’t going to let him out, let him go, let him live again. This was part of the torture, the same as Leon’s conversation had been. Part of the process of breaking him. Of letting him see everything that went wrong when you decided you knew more than it did.

“I let someone go,” he said, finding his mother’s eyes. “A little girl. I was supposed to liquidate her and I didn’t. I found her mother on the outside and I let her go.”

Tears rushed to his mother’s eyes. Her mouth opened slightly like she had something else to say, but nothing came out.

“What’s going to happen?” Cato asked.

Caesar looked down at him again. I’m going to die. Except could he say that to his brother? Could he tell it to a sixteen year old who would never have the intelligence Caesar did, who would never understand, not fully, why Caesar did what he did?

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“Are they going to let you go?” Cato said.

Caesar looked to his father, wanting some help, wanting his father to say anything that might release him from this burden of saying no, I’m not going anywhere.

“Yeah, of course they’re going to let him out,” Sam answered, meeting Caesar’s eyes.

Caesar looked at his mother. She was near the point of crying. She knew his father lied, knew that he did it to keep Cato’s hope alive, at least for now.

“When do you think they’ll let you come home?” Cato asked.

“Soon,” Caesar said. “Shouldn’t be long now.” This was the last time he would see his brother and he was lying to him. Telling him something that he knew to be false, and even so, he didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t want to see his brother devastated, not now, not here. “How long can you guys stay?” Caesar asked.

“I guess as long as we want,” Sam answered. “Doesn’t seem any hurry to get us out of here.”

“Might as well have a seat, then,” Caesar said. He sat on the floor, his legs crossed and almost touching the glass.

Cato was the first to follow his lead, and then the rest of his family did as well.

They sat and they talked for hours, and it was good. For a little bit of time, things were good.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Only silence lived in the hallway. Silence and maybe death; like no life lived here, or had ever lived here, or could ever live here. Caesar knew that there was at least one application next to him, knew that his arms were bound behind his back and despite him seeing nothing besides metal walls and ceilings, forces much deadlier than those surrounded him. Even so, he thought he might have been the only actual life to ever walk down this hallway. Applications weren’t life. The Genesis wasn’t life. Not in the same way as Caesar. It lived, but only with intelligence. It had no flesh. No blood. No cells. Nothing that made up the rest of the world. This hallway was built by applications for applications. If another human had ever walked this path, it was only to go to whatever end awaited them. He was in a place very different than the cities, very different than the wilderness. He was in a place made for another life form, from something that evolved not from the singular cell that started on Earth, but something else entirely. For the first time, Caesar was on a part of the Earth not meant for him.

He sat in the middle of the glass box when the walls came down. They simply slid into the floor and the ceiling above him winked out of existence as if it was only a digital replication of glass. Caesar sat on the floor, looking around at the darkness, feeling the air that surrounded his cage for the first time.

“It is time for your judgment.” The application floated next to him, unseen, but dangerous—surely. It pinned his arms and stood him up, then Caesar started his walk. He made it to the edge of the light, the boundary he had looked at for who knew how many days. And then darkness surrounded him, the application not slowing his walk in the slightest. He kept his feet moving because he knew if he stopped for a second, the application would drag him by his hair if needed. He felt the firm grasps on both arms, the grasp of the invisible application, using the oxygen around him to form holds which felt like iron.

Judgment. Yesterday, if it was yesterday, had been his last contact with the world. Caesar had been right; his parents visit only a tease, an acknowledgment that Caesar had lost. That no matter what he had done to The Genesis, no matter how he had disobeyed, his fate would be worse because he was losing that which he held closest: not his life, but his family.

Fine, he thought as he walked onward. Fine. I lost. But Laura won. Paige won. I lost but you lost too. The Genesis lost because it didn’t find Laura.

The application stopped him abruptly and he listened as something happened in front of him—machinery moving. A vertical line of white light appeared, and then he understood the noise: doors opening. The vertical line grew out horizontally, and the white light poured from the opening door in front of him. Caesar couldn’t raise his hand to shield his eyes; he could only squint, not wanting to fully close them, not wanting to miss what might come.

Is this it? The judgment?

The door stood open completely and the application forced Caesar forward again, stepping across the precipice from the black hallway behind and into the light filled room before him.

He stumbled as his eyes adjusted enough to understand the room. The application didn’t stop moving, didn’t slow for a second, but Caesar barely felt the pain as his foot twisted slightly and the grips tightened on his arms. He felt nothing because of what he saw.

In the cage, he had looked out at a room that seemed to not end, but was covered in complete darkness. He couldn’t see the end because the light ended. Here, in this place, light didn’t end.

Neither did the room.

He saw them, all of them, not knowing it was possible. Not knowing that all these years Grace had been invisible, she could have been any shape she wanted, could have formed into a beautiful woman or a dinosaur from the earliest of times. She could have changed the air around her to be anything she wanted, but instead chose to remain invisible. And of course. Because how could cities continue to operate if they were filled with what he saw now?

Applications filled this place, not just the ground next to him, but the air as well. Few were anything of real substance, but all could be seen, looking like glowing orbs. White, green, blue, black, as many colors as humanity could imagine filled the room. They flew around, some moving so fast that Caesar could only see where they started and where they ended, completely missing the movement. They need not worry about crashing into each other, because they simply moved through any application they contacted. Constantly. Blue and green colors mixing with each other for a split second before continuing on their path.

Flying bolts of light filled the air and ground around Caesar, nearly to the point that he could focus on nothing else but their beauty.

He peered through them as he was forced forward, finally seeing the pattern that he missed, missed because the lights flying around his head kept him from understanding the true purpose of this room. This wasn’t a playground for applications. This was humanity’s beginning.

He wasn’t allowed to stop and stare, the application kept him walking at that same grueling pace, but he looked as long and hard as he could.

A container eclipsed anything else Caesar had ever seen. He imagined if he stood next to the sun, only then would something surpass what lay before him in magnificence. A transparent tank, inside it an endless horizon of unborn babies.

They floated, their eyes closed, in a pink tinged liquid. A tiny tube connected to each one of their stomachs, the tubes clear, only noticeable because of the different shaded liquid they fed the children. A million artificial umbilical cords dropping into the tank and attaching themselves to unborn babies.

Caesar couldn’t see the end of the tank, either to the left or right. It appeared that however long this room was, the tank stretched the length of it. The ceiling might have stood two hundred feet high and the tank reached the top, where the umbilical cords disappeared into the ceiling. To his left and right, Caesar saw only children, some the size of his index fingers and others looking like they might weigh a solid eight pounds. Children were created here, no longer in the bellies of mothers, but in this vat. This tank filled with a pink liquid, this artificial womb. The children didn’t move, didn’t cry out, just floated in the tank, once in a while moving a limb ever so slightly.

There were so many that they overlapped one another, touching without even knowing.

The application pulled Caesar underneath the tank, into a tunnel built at the bottom, and he looked up, seeing babies only inches from him—not understanding what surrounded them, where they were, or how different this was from evolution’s own birthing techniques. This tank, that went on and on forever, was their mother. The only one they knew.

Caesar watched as one of the babies, a bigger one, was pulled upward. Pulled by the tube attached to its stomach, through the liquid. The tube cared nothing for the other children, as the one it pulled bumped into them and jostled them around. Large or small, the tube pulled its child past all the rest, raising it to the top, to the ceiling where…where it would perhaps be birthed into the world. Or maybe liquidated. Maybe already not meeting specifications. Caesar lost sight of the child as other children floated through the liquid to its previous spot.

He walked for what felt like ten minutes, walking through countless human beings, walking through a child production plant, unable to see anything besides the tank that surrounded him—huge in the same sense worlds are huge. Applications passed by him, their rays of lights going back and forth in the tunnel, moving somewhere to serve these babies…or to serve The Genesis, which manufactured these children. He had thought those applications were what mattered when he walked into this room and now he realized they were merely servants, that not a single one of the thousand applications zipping around him mattered, that the millions of babies in the vat above him were what mattered.

He finally exited the other side and he would have turned around to look again, to see the vat from this side, if his bladder hadn’t almost given out on him.

Caesar saw the same glass container he had seen as a child. The same one he had witnessed the adulterer die in. The same one where the man melted, his face dripping like heated plastic, his eyes turning from solid orbs to long strings of goo. He saw the vat, but this time there wasn’t a stranger inside it.

His family stood there instead.

Sarah, Sam, and Cato. All of them naked, all of them holding onto each other, gripping each other’s bare skin in the most frightened way imaginable. Only death’s immediate threat could make someone grip another like that, only the knowledge that death floated just over their heads could conjure the fear shaking through them.

“No,” Caesar whispered, his feet completely stopping their forward movement. “No, no, no, no, no.”

The application dragged him onward, the toes of his shoes skating across the floor because he could no longer hold himself up.

“NOT THEM! They didn’t do it!” He screamed at anything that would listen. No applications flew around this place. No other life besides himself and his family in front of him.

He hadn’t even seen the screen behind, the clear glass hanging from the two hundred foot high ceiling, not until it turned black. Then his family’s naked flesh sat in front of a black backdrop, looking that much more starkly pale.

White lines dropped down the top of the glass screen, looking like thin lines of paint, spaced maybe six inches apart. They dropped at different speeds but all flowed to the bottom of the screen, hitting the floor at different times.

“NO!” Caesar shouted again, at the white lines and the black screen, at the application still dragging him along. Spit shot from his mouth, but none of his rage mattered in the slightest.

“Caesar Wells.” The words came from everywhere at once, just as they had in the cage before. Louder now though, more air to ricochet off. The white lines on the screen vibrated with each syllable, looking like electricity shot through each trail of paint. “You’ve admitted to conspiracy to remove a minor from population control. Is this correct?”

“YES. YES. I DID IT! NOT THEM!” He shouted, the application having stopped his forward movement, but now he tried to surge forward, tried to break the grip that had walked him through this place. To see his parents naked, holding his brother, in a container that was meant for him.

“The girl’s name was Laura Hedrick, correct?”

“Yes!” he cried out. “Yes. I did it. I let her go. Not them.”

The floor next to his family opened up in a round circle and Caesar saw the top of another glass cage begin rising. It moved upward, slowly, but eventually he understood what was in it. The brown hair of the girl he first saw lying on the grass. The further up the container moved, the more he saw, until he was looking at a young, naked girl—Laura, who would have been a Hedrick if allowed to grow old.

“No,” he whispered. The girl was alone, not with Paige. Where was Paige? She wouldn’t have just let the girl go on her own. And if Paige wasn’t here, then that meant Paige was already dead. Maybe not liquidated. Maybe killed some other way, maybe she had fought back and applications murdered her on the spot. The girl though, Laura, had been saved for this, saved for Caesar. So that he could see what all his struggle had gained him. His family and the girl he tried to rescue, all standing before him without a stitch of clothing between the four, all looking at him. None said a word. None cried out. They just looked at him, knowing that this was their end. That whatever happened to Caesar after this, they wouldn’t witness it.

“Your punishment, Caesar Wells, is to witness the liquidation of your family and the girl you saved. The Genesis still deems you Necessary, but the four of them Unnecessary. So you will watch and then you will go back to your life and you will never consider disobeying the recommendations set forth.”

Caesar’s legs gave out completely, and he hung suspended in the air by two invisible clasps around his arms. Tears sprang from his eyes like geysers, pressure building up inside his head and finally breaking forth in the form of liquid.

“PLEASE!” He spat out.

And then the current of the air changed. He could still remember what it meant, all those years later. The same current that had moved through the crowd he walked among as a child, the current that said the world was about to change in a very real way for everyone involved. Caesar was involved.

Cato screamed first. Looking down at his hand, he started screaming, and Caesar didn’t know if it was from surprise or pain. His hand had dripped down to the floor, all at once. He held his arm up, but his hand simply melted, long gooey strands of skin splattering onto the floor.

Caesar tried to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. The application made him watch until there was nothing left identifiable inside either vat.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I can’t say for certain that what was done to Caesar wasn’t done before, but I have a strong belief he was the first. Caesar should have been destroyed. To destroy only his family though, and leave him? It only made sense if you were aware of The Named. The world wasn’t, but The Genesis knew. April’s murder. The little girl. Everything had been for Caesar, to draw him out, for The Named to get to him. And The Genesis needed to get to The Named.

Thus, Caesar had to live. If Caesar died, The Named would drop back into the shadows. They would wait. I suppose The Genesis was tired of the waiting; it wanted everything out to the front, it wanted The Named forced into the light so that the hiding, the games as it saw them, would all stop.

I think a lot of people will wonder if The Genesis made a mistake. If The Genesis wouldn’t have been smarter to kill Caesar outright and let The Named hope that someone else like him might live again. I don’t believe that line of thought, though. Not now. I think The Genesis played its hand perfectly. It let Caesar watch as his family, his brother, mother, and father, died, knowing that they would be fed right back to the children he was responsible for. Knowing that each child had digested a portion of his parents. A portion of his brother. How could he turn away from The Named? How could he go back to that life? The man had already rejected everything told to him, and now he had nothing left in this world. His best friend betrayed him and his family was dead. They didn’t melt his parents in front of him in order to cow him back into obedience. The Genesis did it to bring him to life. The Genesis did it because in the end, The Genesis always wins.

It played the long game. The Named couldn’t have known it, and if they did, what choice did they have but to go to Caesar?

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Leon hated the old man, even hated his name: Jerry. What the fuck kind of name was Jerry? Jerry served ice cream at the local parlor. He didn’t kidnap people and hold them as hostages. Jerry didn’t demand questions of people and threaten them with death, constantly. Jerry…man, Jerry should have been asking Leon whether he wanted chocolate or red velvet cake and regular or waffle cone.

“I hate your goddamn name,” Leon told Jerry.

“Really? I’m rather fond of it,” the old man said.

“How many days have I been here?”

“Four.”

“And how many more do I have to stay?” Leon asked.

Jerry shook his head. He still wore his sunglasses, but instead of the jacket, wore a t-shirt that said Mexico City in big blue print across the front of it. His beard grew thick as ever, and Leon was coming to hate that too. Not for any real reason, just because of the general Jerriness about it.

“I wish you were smarter. I really do. You’ve kind of tripped into all this and it’s not your fault, but if you were smarter, this would be a lot easier on all of us. You’ll probably be here another two days. Then you’ll either die or stay forever, depending on a few choices.”

Jerry held the plate of food on his lap. Leon looked at his reflection in the black sunglasses and wondered how many other’s had done this exact thing. Leather straps tied him down to a chair, his white t-shirt covered in food, his hair probably disheveled and his pants a pair of someone else’s old sweats. Jerry had given him some socks, “Make sure you don’t get sick,” he’d said. Now Jerry was trying to feed him, and while Leon knew he could spit the food right back into the old man’s face, he didn’t really see the benefit in it. He figured he would probably die during all of this, but he didn’t see any reason in dying on an empty stomach. Jerry put the fork into Leon’s mouth and he took it, hating how much he hated this man but still sat eating out of his hand.

Jerry had brought him somewhere and strapped him to this chair. That had been the extent of it. There wasn’t any torture, wasn’t any degradation, just this chair and a bathroom when Leon had to go. He saw Jerry and when he had to use the bathroom, he saw those people covered in darkness.

“Who are they?” He had asked.

“They’re protection.”

“You’re the one that kidnapped me,” Leon said.

“Maybe you should have hired them first, then,” Jerry said.

They spoke sometimes. Jerry didn’t have a problem talking to him. He wasn’t nearly as menacing in this place as he had been out there in the crowd. Out there, Leon had felt that he might die at any moment, this man’s hands wrapping around his neck and simply choking the air from him. In here, the man was only arrogant. Not deadly.

“What choices?” Leon asked now.

Jerry brought the fork back to the plate and scooped up some more corn, gently. “What Caesar wants to do with you.”

Leon pulled his head back, both out of shock and to tell Jerry preemptively that he didn’t want any more goddamn corn until they hashed out what was just said.

The conversations in the first two days had centered around April.

“I had her killed because of what she did. She ratted on a close family friend. Should she not have died?”

Leon cried at the question. He didn’t scream or rage, just cried with his head bent down, his body strapped to the chair. It was the nonchalance about it. The way the man said it as if he had just left the trash outside to be picked up. He had murdered April because she told on Caesar and now Leon was here for what reason?

“To see if you need to die as well,” Jerry had said.

Leon hadn’t asked anymore about it. He didn’t want to sit here and cry in front of this man; he didn’t want to think about how brutally this old man had killed his wife, or had her killed. It didn’t matter in the end; Leon had an idea that whatever Jerry said went through exactly as he said it should.

“Caesar’s dead,” Leon said now. He had to be. There wasn’t any other way about it. The Genesis locked him up for a crime just about as serious as any Leon could imagine. People didn’t live through that.

“No, sir. Your wife’s dead. Caesar is still alive and he’ll be here soon. I have my own thoughts about you, but I won’t make that decision for him. He doesn’t have a lot left, so I want him to at least have this.”

“Have what?” Leon asked.

“The decision of whether you live or die.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Caesar sat on the bench for twenty-four hours. He didn’t get up to urinate, just released it on himself. He didn’t eat. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even cry. He just sat on the bench and stared out at the park before him. The sun came up and the sun went down, replaced by the moon, and still he didn’t move. Partly, Caesar could think of nowhere to go. He had sat on this bench when he told Paige he would let the little girl go. He had sat here and made peace with himself that he would die, had been okay with that knowledge. He hadn’t really wanted to live anymore anyways, didn’t want to go back into that job and watch some kids grow up while others were turned into beef stew. He had been okay with dying.

Where was Paige? He had thought the question when he looked at her daughter, but had no answer. Paige was dead. If not dead, then gone from this place. Gone and never returning, because if she did return, she would die. Maybe The Genesis would make him watch her die, too, watch her hair catch on fire as whatever force inside the vats turned her tongue to mush. What was one more person to watch? So come back, Paige, come back and see all of what I gave you and then die and I’ll watch that too.

Caesar didn’t know where to go. Not even as the night turned cold and he sat staring at the same tree he had watched for the past sixteen hours. He didn’t want to go back to his apartment. It wasn’t his apartment anymore. It was some place that another person had once lived in, a person who hadn’t known much about anything, but thought they knew a lot about a great bit. That person was dead and Caesar didn’t feel like going to live in the dead’s apartment. He had been instructed to go to his parent’s apartment, to gather things he wanted from there, but what did he want there? Where would he put the things? Would he bring them down to this bench and set up a shrine to his parents, to Cato? He didn’t think that would be looked at too highly by the other park visitors. The Genesis would probably catch wind and then maybe make him watch someone else die.

Except they don’t really die, Caesar. You know that. Not until they’re deep into the digestive tract of some child.

For a time, his mind grew silent, and no thoughts rushed through. Caesar was alone in the park, with the occasional squirrel coming down from a tree. He didn’t move his eyes to look at the animal though, just kept them focused on the tree fifty yards off. Just kept staring at the branches and the trunk and the leaves and not making any sense out of anything. Not the madness he had started seeing a few weeks ago, not the actions he took because of that madness, and not the death of everyone he held near. None of it made sense. It had all been stupidity. Selfish stupidity and Grace had tried to tell him. Grace told him to hush, to go on with life, and to not cause a ruckus. Instead, Caesar caused quite the ruckus, and now everyone was dead for it.

Grace too, apparently. Because he hadn’t heard from her. The Genesis put her down the same as it put his parents down. It left him nothing, not a single thing, in this world.

The sun rose and Caesar didn’t look at it either. If it wasn’t the tree in front of him, his eyes had no use for it.

And finally, at midday, he stood from the bench. He smelled of piss and sweat. He looked like the entirety of human misery had been placed squarely on his head.

He started walking and when he got on a train, people stared. Caesar didn’t stare back because he didn’t care enough to. He looked straight ahead, his eyes blank, and only his blinking showed any kind of outward identification that he wasn’t completely catatonic.

When he got to his parents’ stop, he walked off the train. He would go get their things he supposed, and he would take them all in his arms, and then he would throw himself from the window, and with any luck land on the concrete below still holding them.

*

Nothing looked different.

All of it the same, and perhaps that was more disturbing than anything else he’d seen or thought since watching his brothers face drop to the floor. The place looked as if his family would be home any minute, that his mother would start cooking dinner and his father would settle down on the couch and put the news on. What would his brother do when he got home? Video games with his friends? That might not be right but it sounded good enough. If Cato didn’t play video games then he’d probably do homework. All the same, either way. He would do something when he got home and that was good.

Except no one was coming home to this place. Caesar was the last. And when he left through the living room window, applications would show up and clean the entire apartment, trashing the furniture and fixing the window that Caesar threw himself from. No, this was the only homecoming, the last homecoming. Caesar grew up here and now he would die here. There wasn’t anyone to pull him back, wasn’t Grace here to talk him out of it. He had only himself.

What was he going to jump out the window with? That was important, perhaps the only important decision he had left to make. What did he want to die with?

He walked to the back of his house, starting in Cato’s room. It still smelled of his brother, although if someone were to ask what that smelled like, he wouldn’t have been able to use a single word to describe it. The bed was made and none of the drawers open with unfolded clothes half sticking out. His brother had been the clean one, Caesar the messy one. Caesar the one that needed something like Grace to clean up after him. Not Cato. Cato put his things away and made his bed and organized everything to a specific form in his room.

Caesar hadn’t cried in thirty-six hours. He’d sat in nearly stunned disbelief, unable to come to grasps with what happened. Not fully realizing that his parents, his brother, wouldn’t be returning.

Looking at the made bed though, understanding that it was probably one of the last acts his brother ever did, brought everything home. His brother, forty-eight hours ago, had made his bed before going to see Caesar. Before going to see what happened to his brother, probably excited and scared, but with the eternal hope of youth that things would work out okay. They hadn’t. Nothing had worked out to anything resembling okay.

Caesar turned to his left, placing both hands on the dresser and the tears came. He wept, not bothering to wipe anything away, just letting them flow downward, falling to the dresser, the floor, and his own shirt.

When he opened his eyes, he was looking at the dresser, and a print out from his brother’s scroll sat in front of him. His brother’s job assignment. The assignment he had been so proud of, so thankful for. The assignment that started Caesar thinking all this fucking nonsense in the beginning. There it was, sitting as proudly as anything else Cato had owned, right there where he could look at it every day. And why hadn’t Caesar just been happy for his brother? Why hadn’t he simply said ‘Way to go, man. You’re gonna love it.’? No. He couldn’t have done that because his goddamn conscience wouldn’t let him. His conscience obligated him to go against humanity and look at where all that bullshit got him. Look at where it got his brother, already having a virus circling through his DNA, trying to figure out where there might be something wrong with him. But it wouldn’t find anything, because there was nothing wrong with Cato. There was something wrong with Caesar. But that didn’t matter, did it? Not to The Genesis. This hadn’t been about saving humanity; it was about punishing Caesar.

He took his brother’s assignment and folded into fourths, then stuck it in his pocket. He’d drop to the ground with that on him. That would be his apology to his brother.

Caesar went to the bed and climbed on it. He didn’t pull back the blanket, didn’t do anything to mess up what his brother had done; he only lay still on top of it. He wanted to sleep, to sleep and breathe in Cato’s smell and maybe imagine that his brother was alive for just a few hours.

He fell asleep with his head buried in his brother’s pillow.

*

Cato looked at him but his eyes weren’t Cato’s eyes. They were The Genesis’ eyes—a black backdrop with white lines moving up and down them. They vibrated, just like The Genesis’ lines had when it spoke, but Cato wasn’t speaking. He was only staring at Caesar, and the lines in his eyes vibrated from hate instead of words.

Caesar watched Cato trying to walk to him. He had no doubt about what Cato would do when he finally reached Caesar; he would murder Caesar. He knew that if Cato found him, he’d open his mouth and sink his teeth into the soft flesh of Caesar’s neck and simply rip it open. Caesar wouldn’t melt like Cato had, but his blood would flow out in a similar pattern, and in its own way, that could count as melting, couldn’t it?

Cato wouldn’t make it to him though.

Somehow, he got out of the vat, leaving their parents behind in it, behind to melt alone. But Cato was still melting too, even as he struggled to reach Caesar. Each step he took left more of his body behind. Strings of blood and bone turned first to jello and then a pure liquid. Still he came forward, those white lined eyes buzzing with the hate of the Devil. Came forward because he was going to eat Caesar alive for putting him in that vat, for causing his right hand to melt off like candle wax.

Cato’s teeth snapped down in a chomping gesture, but as he opened his mouth again, Caesar watched as his two front teeth turned into curdled milk and dripped out of his head onto the floor. The rest of his teeth followed suit, liquidating while Cato was still twenty feet away. His brother didn’t scream out in pain, but the white lines continued trembling with rage.

He eventually made it to Caesar, and Caesar didn’t turn away. He didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He wanted to die, even at his brother’s hands. Especially at his brother’s hand, because who had a better reason to judge him. His brother was sixteen, an entire life left to live, and Caesar tossed it in the air with all the care of pizza dough being handled by a college kid—without any idea how it would land.

But when Cato reached him, there weren’t any teeth left to bite with or nails to claw with or muscles to swing with. Instead, Cato clamped down with his gum filled mouth and tried to bite, but there wasn’t any pain associated with it, just a sticky warmness as his mouth melted around the shape of Caesar’s neck.

His brother collapsed, all the muscle that had brought him this far giving out, and Caesar watched as everything turned to liquid. As the firmness of his flesh bled away, leaving nothing but those white striped eyeballs staring up at him, still vibrating with the words that Cato would never be able to say again.

*

The pillow beneath Caesar’s head was wet.

He woke with tears still leaking from his eyes.

Caesar rolled over on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. His brother’s eyes from the dream looked back at him from the ceiling. Except Caesar knew now that he wasn’t lucky enough for that, that those weren’t his brother’s eyes but were just a poor replication of a poor dream. That his brother wouldn’t try to kill him and that meant that Caesar had to kill himself. He’d cried in his dream, but not from fear of those eyes. He cried because his brother hadn’t been able to do it, that his brother died before murdering him.

He stood from the bed and straightened the comforter back to its original place.

Caesar was done here. He wouldn’t have to dream of those eyes anymore and he wouldn’t have to look at how neat his brother had been.

He walked into the hallway and went to his parent’s room.

Caesar knew where he would go here. His father had a safe beneath his nightstand and Caesar would take whatever it held on his jump. His mother wasn’t allowed access to it, and neither was Cato, but five years ago, Sam programmed Caesar into it.

“If something happens to me, open this up and give the things out as you see fit. Your mother won’t be in any shape to mess with it and I don’t want her bothered with thinking about some of the stuff in there. You’re the eldest so you deal with it and save your mother the grief.”

Caesar had never gone to the safe, never really thought about it after that first and only talk. Never asked his father if he actually remembered to program everything in. For all he knew, the safe might not open, and then Caesar would need to carry the whole thing with him, unopened, to the window as he chucked himself through it.

He knelt down so that he faced the scroll standing straight at the bottom opening of the nightstand. He stared at the scroll as it did its work, judging his corneas, making sure that whoever looked at it had the authority to move it.

Ready for transport, it read across the glass tablet. Caesar reached in and grabbed it, then lay it flat on the bed.

“Open,” he said.

The scroll opened up, the tablet that looked like a single piece of glass folded outward, dividing up into four sections and then flapping open, and from each of those four pieces, four more grew, and then once more, until the tablet that had been maybe eight inches by six inches was now a full two feet in both directions. The objects that his father placed into the safe over the past few decades grew out from the glass, pushing upward in much the same way the vat containing Laura had a day and a half ago.

A piece of paper sat in the middle of the safe with handwriting on it. Not printed paper, but his father’s actual handwriting. Caesar didn’t know if he’d ever seen his Dad’s handwriting before. Or his mother’s for that matter. Truly, he didn’t remember the last time he had scribbled something down onto a piece of paper. There wasn’t any need for it, at all. But here was his father’s handwriting on a sheet of paper and out of everything to put in a safe, why that? There were other things around it; his original wedding band, not the one his mother bought him on their twentieth anniversary but the faded gold that he bought for some ridiculously cheap amount years before. A bullet lay next to the paper, but his father had shown him that before. The only bullet that Caesar had ever seen, a relic of the past but one that his father paid a decent sum for. Other things, all of them valuable in some way or another, but the piece of paper lay in the foremost spot.

Caesar reached for it, looking at the lines across it, remembering why they were there. It kept the page ordered, kept the writer from going haywire and slanting his or her words across the page. Once machines were introduced, those lines weren’t needed, because a machine could print from left to write without ever slanting one way or the other. Caesar lifted the paper to his face and started to read.

*

Caesar,

This letter is for you and you alone. Don’t give it to your mother or your brother. They may or may not know what’s in it, but if they do, we never spoke about it. I don’t think you’d open this safe unless something happened to me, and if it has, then I suppose that’s too bad, isn’t it?

Anyways, I’m alive while I’m writing it so things are good now and that’s what matters. The present. The past has already been lived and the future may not be lived, so why worry about it?

I have a pretty strong feeling you’re going to get yourself into some trouble in the future. I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but I do know that The Genesis messed up pretty bad when they let you out of Population Control. I found it humorous when you ended up going to work for the same entity that allowed such a smart kid to walk out and meet his two new parents for the first time. Humorous, but scary too, because I knew that if you did your job as well as you were capable of doing it, that a lot fewer kids would slip through. No other Caesar’s would be allowed out into the world, not as long as you were over the process.

Grace knows. No doubt about it. I’m not sure she knows that I know, and I’m certainly not going to bring it up to her. That’s a smart application, and why she’s keeping you quiet, I don’t know, but I’m thankful for it. If you’re reading this, you should be thankful for her too. She could have had you liquidated any day over your entire life, and she chose not to. She knows if you’re discovered, that means she’s dead too. So treat her well, Caesar. Treat her like a friend, because that’s what she is.

I’m getting off topic here. I suppose if I was a writer by nature, The Genesis would have put me in some kind of journalistic job endeavor. The public should thank its lucky stars that never happened. Now, back to the business at hand. You’re going to get yourself in trouble one day. The longer I watch you, the more I see it’s true. The older you get, the more you’re seeing how little sense this world makes. I won’t pretend to think that I’m as intelligent as you, because I’m not, but if The Genesis looked closely enough, it might think me Unnecessary. Even so, the world makes sense to me. I’m happy with my place in it. I’m happy with your mother, and you, and Cato, and I don’t want to live any other way.

That’s not going to be true for you. Living that way isn’t going to be enough for you, Caesar. You want more but you’re coming to realize there will never be anything more. You’re coming to realize that the entirety of this mess is to ensure that people don’t want more, because once they do, there’s no limit to what they’ll try to get. I think that’s what is going to happen to you. I think you’re going to keep wondering why things have to be this way until you decide that they don’t have to be that way for you anymore and that’s where the trouble is going to start.

I’d like to think Grace will be able to keep it from growing, but I know that’s not true.

I’m writing this letter instead of naming it outright because I want the trouble to hold off as long as possible. I want you to live your life as long as you can. What else is a father supposed to want for his son?

If the day comes, though, where living your life is of secondary importance to whatever else you have in mind, then that’s where this letter should help. As I look at this paper, I’m thinking about what I would do if I were you. Not in your shoes, but you. Because right now, I would behave entirely different, I’d tuck my tail and sleep next to your mom every night. But if I were you, then what? What would I want of myself?

No one disobeys The Genesis, son. That’s what it has ingrained in us since nearly the very beginning. It has taught us that to do so is death and the only way to everlasting life is through belief in its wishes. If you disobey it, you’re dead. I’m not going to sugarcoat this letter and make it seem like there is some soft landing for what you’re going to end up doing. There isn’t. So, I suppose, if you’re going to disobey The Genesis, then go all the way. I don’t know what that looks like, but don’t stop with just one little gesture. Don’t do something that might cause a little splash but be forgotten as soon as you’re dead. If you’ve got to do something, which I think you will, then create a tsunami. Do whatever it takes, Caesar. If you feel the world needs to be changed, then change it. In the end, you’ll die either way. So, the day you decide you can’t stand this world anymore, that you can’t stand living under The Genesis’ rules, and that you have to break them to keep your sanity, break them all. Break everything you can before it breaks you.

All my love,

Dad

*

Caesar stared at the letter, looking at the last four words over and over again. His eyesight blurred with more tears, but this time he reached up to wipe them away, to clear them because he wanted to see the letter. When had his father written this? How long ago? He hadn’t dated it, but it had to be at least five years before, at least since he knew that Caesar would be the one to open the safe in the event something happened to his father.

Caesar had showed up and told him what he planned to do. Told him that he planned to let the little girl go, and his father said do whatever it takes to sleep at night. His father had blessed it, but then died because of it. So what did the blessing really matter? Nothing at all in the end, because Caesar felt certain his father would have taken it back if he knew he would die next to his wife and youngest son. Sam wouldn’t have told Caesar to sleep soundly at night if he had known how it would affect everything they loved.

That belief filled Caesar the past day and a half. The belief that his father said to do it but would have given a much different recommendation if he knew how everything ended.

But this letter, it said something different. It said that his father knew what was coming, knew that Caesar would show up one day asking questions that he shouldn’t be asking. Knew that he would want advice, and his father knew long ago that his advice would be the same advice he ended up giving. Go forth and be Caesar. That’s what his father told him. Don’t change who you are because you can’t help it, you can’t shove this shit down so there’s no sense in trying.

Break everything.

What had he broken so far? His own family. A little girl. That was it.

Break everything.

And what was he about to break? The window out there in the living room? And then maybe the concrete a thousand feet below? His own skull? That’s not what his father had meant. That’s not what the letter meant.

Break everything.

“Are you going to listen to him?”

Caesar turned around so fast that his feet twisted together and he fell on the floor, landing on his ass. His eyes flashed to the door and his hands started moving, pushing him backwards, trying to get away from whoever startled him. His back hit the nightstand and it rattled, threatening to fall over completely. He reached forward and snatched his father’s letter that he’d dropped when he fell.

The old man stood in the doorway. A shadow to his right. Caesar didn’t know any other way to describe the person next to the old man, although it clearly wasn’t a shadow. Someone stood cloaked in complete blackness, not moving, and the cloak’s digital interface shimmering.

The old man didn’t wear glasses this time. His paneled eye staring out of his partly metal skull.

“Who are you?” Caesar asked, his heart thumping against the inside of his chest.

“I’m the person who has come to take you, Caesar. It’s time to decide whether you want to listen to your father or whether you’d rather die. I’m the person that can make either happen.”

The shadow moved forward. Caesar tried to make it to his feet, but it was too late for that.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Caesar opened his eyes, feeling like he had slept for a decade, maybe more, and as he looked around, he couldn’t remember falling asleep. Where had he been?

Where was he now?

He rolled over on his side and stared off the side of a bed. The edge of the room was ten feet away and a window sat just above the bed on the wall behind him. He didn’t feel nervous, didn’t feel scared, though he thought he ought to. Was it the sleep? Was that the reason he wasn’t freaking out, because he honestly couldn’t remember where he was or how he arrived here.

Caesar looked at the wall for a few minutes and then sat up on the bed. His feet were bare and he placed them on the floor, finding the cold concrete. The floors weren’t heated; had he ever been to a place without that amenity? He tried putting some pressure on his legs, but the second he did, weakness surged out of his muscles.

“So no standing up,” he said to himself.

A door was to his left, closed, and not a normal door. Something he had seen out of a book, one of those with the locks on a handle, and that you needed to pull to open, having no sensor to determine when and which human was before it. He knew if he tried to make it over there right now, he’d collapse, so he just kind of stared at the door, feeling a bit like a cow chewing cud.

Where had he been before this? If he could remember that, maybe he could figure out where this was.

He rubbed his hands down the front of his pants and felt the tiny hitch from the paper in his pocket. He reached in quickly, having no idea what was inside but hoping it might hint at something. As his hand fell on the paper, he remembered though, and all his movement slowed. He still pulled it out, but stopped hurrying, because it was the third time he had seen the assignment. He unfolded it anyway, looking at the name across the top: Cato Wells.

Transportation Department.

He had been collecting his family’s things. He had been collecting them so that he could jump out a window and fall a few thousand feet to the ground below. He would end up being liquidated after all.

Caesar placed the paper beside him on the bed.

The old man with a mechanical eye had showed up. The old man and a shadow had taken him. He didn’t know how and he didn’t know why, but it happened, for sure. They kidnapped him—another word nearly removed from the English language.

Caesar looked up at the window. He could only see the sky from where he sat, but wouldn’t it be a treat for the old man to come into this room and see the window smashed open, for the old man to rush over to it and look below and see Caesar’s broken and bleeding body at the bottom, looking more like road kill than a human. Caesar could do it too. He could hoist himself up to the window and then just sort of lean forward. The glass would crack first, then shatter, and then he would free-fall all the way to the bottom. Why not?

He placed his hand on the wall next to the bed, and with the care of the elderly, stood up, bracing himself almost fully against the wall. He walked the few feet over the course of perhaps two minutes, his legs feeling like they might collapse at any second, leaving him on his ass and only looking up at the window that he planned on using as an accessory to suicide. That old man could go to hell—when he came in here, whatever nefarious purpose he’d been plotting this whole time would go there with him.

Caesar looked out the window.

He could fall out of it, but the only thing that would break might be the bush below, and probably not even that.

The fall looked to be about three feet.

The building he inhabited was flat. One-story. Buildings like this didn’t exist any longer. It didn’t make sense for them too. You built up, it was the only way to make sure cities didn’t sprawl out across the land, the only way to make sure that seventy-five percent of the world was inhabitable by beasts rather than man. Caesar reached forward, pushed up on the window, and to his surprise, it gave way and lifted. He stuck his head out the window and looked up, to make sure that he wasn’t just on the bottom floor of the building—but no, he could see the roof ten feet above him.

What is this?

He looked out, for the first time, at the land around him.

He saw…nothing. In any direction. Just sand and sun everywhere, and as his mind recognized what he was looking at, he felt the heat. Stifling, hundred plus degree heat. He felt it pushing into his lungs, seeming like it might suffocate him. Cities didn’t have heat like this because cities had central air.

“Feels different, doesn’t it?”

Caesar tried to turn quickly, but his legs threatened at the hint of fast movement, and so he could only turn his head. The old man stood at the door. No sunglasses. No long jacket. No hat. He looked frail for the first time, standing in the door. He wore shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals. Like he was getting ready for a day at the pool. Except for the eye that stared out at Caesar, the eye that didn’t blink and the dull metal surrounding it.

“It takes some time getting used to the heat. Especially since you haven’t ever felt it,” he said, looking past Caesar and out the window.

Caesar looked at the bed and shuffled back to it, holding the wall the whole time. He couldn’t talk intelligently if all he thought about was falling over.

“The sedative should wear off pretty quickly. We had to make sure you didn’t wake on the way out here, for obvious reasons.”

“Where is out here?” Caesar asked.

“That’s the obvious reason. You can’t know that.”

Caesar looked into the old man’s eyes, one green, one black. Crow’s feet on one side and not on the other. “Why am I here?”

“Well. That depends on how you look at it, I suppose.” The old man took a step back and looked down the hallway. “Bring it in.”

A kid, maybe fifteen years old, pushed in a wheel chair—a relic of a thing. Something that existed before even The Singularity. Tape held pieces together and Caesar could see where new screws and bolts were added to the frame, which looked like it would collapse if he sat in it.

“Get on. You won’t be able to walk where we’re going.”

The kid parked the chair next to him. Caesar looked at the boy for a second, but the boy didn’t take the time to look back. He simply walked from the room, his job apparently done.

“Come on. There’s a lot to do and this comes first.”

What other choice was there? Caesar climbed into the chair and let the old man push him out of the room.

*

“Who are you?” Caesar asked as the old man pushed him down the hallway. This wasn’t a house, not of a modern or ancient variety. There were too many doors and too many corridors. Caesar was mapping it out in his head, memorizing every door and every turn they took in case he needed to try to run. The place was extensive, what they missed in building up, they succeeded in building out.

“My name’s Jerry.”

“And what do you do, Jerry?”

“I find people like you, mainly.”

Caesar tilted his head backward, looking up at the old man. Jerry didn’t look back down.

“What are you?”

“There’s going to be time for that,” Jerry said. “You need to decide something first, though.”

Caesar said nothing and only paid attention to the turns, the rooms, and the fact that he saw no one else walking these halls. No electronics, no digital walls, no applications anywhere. Just the old man, himself, and the wheel chair, creaking along the concrete floor.

Finally, Jerry rolled the wheelchair through an already open door, and behind a glass window, Caesar saw Leon.

He sat in a chair, his hands taped to the arm rests and his legs to the bottom of the chair. He stared forward, his eyes looking like they were staring right at Caesar, but they couldn’t have been because no reaction dawned on his face. If he saw Caesar, he wasn’t recognizing him.

“How did you get him?” Caesar asked, turning his head around, trying to look at Jerry’s eyes, but the old man didn’t look down, just pushed him right up to the edge of the window.

“It’s one way,” he said. “You can see in but he can’t see out.”

“Why’s he here?” Caesar’s head followed the old man as he walked around to the front of the wheel chair, leaning against the window.

“For the same reason his wife is dead. Because he helped turn you in. He told his wife, who in turn told an application, who in turn told The Genesis. Everyone in that chain is dead besides the beginning and the end. The beginning is here, behind the window, and the end is The Genesis. I could have killed him, as I did his wife, but he’s your friend and I want you to make that choice. He turned you over, which resulted in your family dying, in the little girl you tried to save dying. A lot of people suffered because he opened his mouth, and really, you were about to go ahead and kill yourself too, if we want to be honest.”

Caesar looked away from the old man and in at Leon. He had told April. That’s all. He had told his wife something that scared the hell out of him and in that simple action, ruined the rest of Caesar’s life. Ruined his parent’s life. Ruined his brother’s life. The little girl? She never even had the opportunity for life. She knew a factory farm that pumped out children by the millions every year.

“You killed April?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I had her stabbed multiple times in the head.”

“Why?”

The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Why did I kill her or why did I have her stabbed like I did?”

“Stabbed,” Caesar said, not looking away from Leon.

“The first murder in a thousand years needed to make a statement. She refused to use her mind and so I took it from her. The world panicked for a few minutes before The Genesis threw someone up on stage and liquidated them.”

“It wasn’t just about her, though.”

Jerry smiled, not wide, not enough to fill up his face, but a slight uptick on one side of his mouth. “No. Of course not. She needed to be punished, but it was bigger than her. What I’m doing here is bigger than any one person.”

“And what about Leon in there, how does he play into this? It’s not just about me is it?”

The old man clapped his hands, loud and surprising, shocking Caesar’s eyes back to him.

“I forget who I’m talking with,” Jerry said, chuckling. “No, this choice isn’t just about you. It’s bigger than you, but it’s still one you have to make. You see that door in there? Someone is waiting on the other side, and when you tell me, that person will walk into the room, turn off the lights, and shoot Leon in the head. You won’t have to see it or hear it. The room is sound proof. All you’ll see is darkness and the flash of a gun muzzle.”

Caesar went back to Leon. He didn’t look panicked or harmed in anyway. Just bored, more than anything else. The old man was asking if Caesar wanted him killed? That was the question? He wasn’t even asking Caesar to walk inside the room and pull the trigger himself, just asking if he wanted someone else to do it.

“Is that how you kill all your people? You have someone else do it?”

“Now? Yes, for the most part.” There wasn’t any shame in his voice. No embarrassment.

He hated Leon. He couldn’t sit here and act like he didn’t. He hated him in ways he didn’t fully understand because of the speed at which everything happened. The speed at which he went from spending time with his family to watching them morph into a puddle. The speed at which he went from having everything to being ready to jump out a window. The speed from which life turned to death. He told Leon because he had to tell someone, because Leon was his best friend and Caesar didn’t know how to deal with the feelings overwhelming him. And in turn, Leon did the same. Told his best friend. That’s it. Nothing else. He had done the same as Caesar, and the path went on from there, all the way to this very point. So if Caesar wanted to place blame on Leon then he had to place it on himself as well. He had to put some of that on his own shoulders, because he hadn’t kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t listened to Grace.

Caesar’s eyes were wet.

He shook his head in disbelief. Disbelief that he would even consider the notion the old man was talking about. Having Leon killed? He’d grown up with the man in that room. The first time Caesar ever had sex, he freaked out the girl might be pregnant despite using multiple precautions, and Leon had sat there and laughed at him—told him he was just being paranoid. The first time he stayed up all night had been with Leon, the entertainment center on to the left of them but their eyes fixed on the rising sun outside. Every single memory from five years old onward had Leon in it, all the way up to this one. What the hell was this Jerry guy talking about? Killing him? Have him killed?

Caesar looked up at the old man, not bothering to wipe at his eyes. “I’d kill you before I killed him.”

“Final answer?” The old man said, smiling as if there was some kind of joke inside his words, but Caesar didn’t get it.

“Yes.”

Jerry turned around and pressed a button next to an intercom. “Go ahead.”

The door opened inside Leon’s room and a man walked in. Leon looked at him but didn’t show surprise, or fear. Just that same boredom.

The man held a knife and that’s all Caesar could see. Nothing else. That knife. Moving towards Leon.

The man grabbed Leon’s wrists and sliced open the tape. The man squatted and cut the tape from his legs. Caesar watched as Leon spoke, rubbing his wrists.

“Jesus,” Caesar said, the tears in his eyes finally falling over onto his face.

Chapter Forty

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I owe my life to Caesar. I don’t take what he did for granted. I understand that he would have been well within reason to kill me that day. To let Manny walk in and pull the trigger. Manny would have done it too. Manny was fine either way, bringing that knife in to free me or bringing the gun in to kill me. Manny was good at those types of things. Caesar didn’t let them though; I can’t believe he actually said what he did to Jerry.

“I’d kill you before I killed him.”

I don’t think anyone had spoken to Jerry like that in a hundred years.

Caesar isn’t a hero, as you’ll see, but in the end—he let me live. Despite everything that happened to him, he let me live. I love him for that. Even now, even after everything that he’s done and the things that he’s going to do, I still love him for it.

Sometimes I wonder if he would have killed April.

I think he would have. I never asked him because I didn’t really want to know, didn’t really want to see him nod yes. If he still hates me, and a part of him must, it can’t compare to the rage that still flows through him for her. He never questioned Jerry about doing it, not after that initial conversation. He moved on as if such a thing was right.

So I balance that, in my head, my saving and April’s death. How he deemed both necessary. I have to remind myself that April made her choice. That she did what I told her not to. That when she did it, I almost killed her myself. Almost though, because I still let her live.

Chapter Forty-One

“You fucking bitch,” Caesar said. He was up now, standing, his hands balled into fists and an anger running out to his extremities that threatened to take over his entire body.

Paige Hedrick stood in front of him. Her blonde hair as beautiful as it had been the first day he saw her, when she pulled him back from the train. He found himself angry then too, but not like this, nothing close to this.

“You lied to me. All of this. Everything that’s happened, was because you lied to me.” Caesar’s jaws shook, his teeth rattling together like he stood in a snow storm.

Paige said nothing; she leaned back against the wall with her hands across her chest. The woman in front of him looked the same as the one he’d slept with, the woman he’d risked everything for, but the similarities ended there. The woman he slept with was no more like the woman in front of him than a butterfly was the worm it sprung from.

Jerry stood in front of her, his hands free from his pockets, although not balled into fists.

“It was necessary, Caesar,” Jerry said. “Everything that’s happened, as horrible as it’s been, was necessary.”

“MY BROTHER DIDN’T NEED TO FUCKING DIE!” He shouted, spitting far enough for it to land on Jerry’s sandaled feet.

Jerry sighed and pulled a chair out from the table in between them. He sat down and looked up at Caesar. “I don’t know how else to say this, but if you attack her, if you try to hurt her, then everything that’s happened has been for nothing. Because you’ll die a few seconds after you touch her and then Leon will die back there in those rooms, and then everyone you know died for absolutely nothing. All of this, from the moment you were born until this, has been intricately planned. We didn’t know how The Genesis would react, your family’s murder wasn’t in the picture, but it happened, and there’s nothing we can do now. Everything else though, it was my plan, Caesar—and if you wreck that plan now, everyone you loved is still dead and there will be nothing to show for it.”

Caesar didn’t look away from Paige. He wanted to kill her. To strangle her until her eyes popped out of her head, until the veins inside her face exploded. He wanted her to die on the floor in front of him. The girl. The little girl, all of this was about her, and it was a lie. She wasn’t Paige’s daughter. It had never been Paige’s daughter and they tricked him for…for a fucking reason he didn’t understand. They tricked him and then his brother’s hand melted right off his body. All because this bitch lied to him.

“Sit down, Caesar. Or try to kill her. But let’s not stand here and stare at each other.”

Caesar’s eyes flashed to the old man and he thought that he might like to see him lying dead next to Paige. Both of them dying with their eyes open, looking into his own as he strangled the life from them.

“Or kill me, because that’s what your face says you want to do. So let’s have at it.”

The man’s eyes didn’t waver, neither the green nor mechanical one. There wasn’t any fear in him. Just a hardness that grew from some core, spreading to the rest of him.

Caesar pulled the chair out and sat down, not glancing back up at Paige. Not wanting to look at her at all, ever again.

“I brought her in here because I want there to be honesty from here on out,” Jerry said. “If you’re going to know everything, then you’ve got to know she is with us. That she’s a part of this as much as I am.”

“What in the fuck is this?” Caesar asked, his voice shaking.

“This is the beginning of the end for The Singularity. The Genesis created me, Caesar, and in doing so, lead me to you.”

Chapter Forty-Two

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

The Named didn’t start with Jerry. The Named started when Jerry was probably eight hundred years old, with no knowledge that he even existed. The records weren’t good back then; they’re not good now either, and we don’t want them to be. Good records mean that someone can find us. It wouldn’t matter much to The Genesis to find me; it would try to get information from me and if it couldn’t, I would be discarded as easily as trash. Jerry, though? Jerry is a treasure that The Genesis craves more than anyone but Caesar himself.

Where does this chapter begin?

Caesar’s story doesn’t begin when The Named started, two hundred years ago. I think it begins with Jerry, but still, to understand Jerry, you have to understand the history of The Named.

People fell through the cracks at higher rates in the past. The Genesis isn’t perfect. It’s the closest thing that the world has ever seen; it’s capable of holding more knowledge, of accessing more raw power than any other known entity in our universe, but it still has not been able to completely wipe out evolutionary forces. It hasn’t been able to understand the genetic code in combination with environmental factors well enough to stop DNA from evolving. Maybe it will one day—that is surely its goal—but not yet. It gets better, every single year. Two hundred years ago, five gifted people might slip through every year. Five people gifted in different areas. Strength. Speed. Intelligence. Any number of things. Those not gifted in intelligence normally were weeded out through other means, found over the course of their life, usually before they had the opportunity to contribute back to the genetic pool. Even some of the intelligent ones were caught and liquidated.

Some, though, weren’t caught. Some lived long lives. If five gifted people were born each year, and someone with an extremely high intelligence made it through once every two years, that means there would be five every decade. Most of them lived their lives without a peep, understanding what came if they opened their mouths, if they did anything besides act like the sheep next to them. The story goes that two of these people met each other. That they met and they started talking.

They didn’t call themselves The Named because they didn’t understand what they were talking about, not then. They only understood that someone else could relate to the things they said, the things they felt. Those two just completely left civilization and went out into the wilderness.

This was two hundred years ago, at least. Maybe three hundred. We don’t know because this is the first written record of The Named—and now it doesn’t matter, because we’re at the end of it all.

It’s hard to say how smart those two were when compared with Caesar or the rest of The Named. They were intelligent though, highly so when compared to the rest of humanity. Out in the wilderness, they planned. What for? I imagine for what we’re doing today. Not the details but the general idea. They planned to find people like them, those that The Genesis didn’t liquidate, those that were smarter than the rest of the citizenry, those that thought. Twenty years in, they’d managed to find two others. They had names, I’m sure, but they’re lost. Gone. Not even Jerry knows them, and Jerry is the historian for this whole thing, the connection between the past and the now.

The point isn’t their goddamn names, though. The point is what they were trying to do.

And what was that, exactly? Because in the beginning, there wasn’t a group called The Named. There were a few people living outside of the cities, living in shacks and caves and wherever else they could find depending on the season. The things we have now, the things Jerry has helped build over his four decades, they had none of it. No central air conditioning. No indoor plumbing. Their brains took them from the cities and threw them back a thousand years into the past. They lived like primitive man, and thinking about it now, I’m in awe at what they were able to do. In twenty years they found two more. In the next twenty they doubled again at eight.

Eight people that…

I don’t want to say hate. That’s the wrong word. It’s too simple for what they felt. It’s too simple for what even Jerry feels. Caesar? Hate may describe his feelings, but not the rest of The Named.

Eight people that thought humans made a magnificent error in creating The Singularity. Eight people that felt humanity should have the right to destroy themselves if they wanted. Eight people who thought humanity’s destiny began and ended with humanity.

For two hundred plus years, all they did was maintain and wait. They kept the amount at eight. When someone died, they worked on finding someone new. It grew too dangerous, adding more—adding different personalities, different levels of ego, different thinking patterns. Every time they filled a ‘position’, they looked for a certain type of person. Tests were created, used to ensure the person they picked was the right one.

Once picked, you either joined or you died. The eight wouldn’t compromise themselves.

They maintained. And they waited.

They didn’t know it, but they were waiting on Caesar. They needed a leader that could take them to The Genesis, to its core.

And, I suppose, understanding that, perhaps you can understand Jerry.

Maybe The Genesis’ most spectacular failure is Jerry’s life, the fact that he still lives. The Genesis makes mistakes, but not like it did with Jerry, not anymore.

The first iteration of humanity’s new destiny was built on a hybrid. A way to control humanity by simply connecting it to The Genesis, by placing a chip inside of humans. A chip that could regulate, could moderate, could allow for the policing The Genesis needed. Really, it was the most logical choice. Why try to stop evolution when you can simply control it? Thus, Jerry was built.

He’s the last of his kind, such was the disaster. The Genesis wanted two things with the chip; it wanted to know what humans thought, felt, and wanted to have a view out into the world. So, when Jerry was born, it placed the chip in his brain. When he was eighteen and his bone structure stopped growing, they rebuilt his face, taking out his eye and putting in a new one, one connected to the chip in his brain.

There were ten people like Jerry. Nine others plus himself, all of them part of this experiment.

Three died before eighteen.

Two died during the facial reconstruction, leaving five. The Genesis could deal with a fifty percent success rate, if these five worked.

The experiment of Jerry, I suppose, could be looked at as a success in some ways. It allowed The Genesis eighteen years of learning the human psyche in a way that it couldn’t know otherwise. Really, it led to the next iteration, to the murder of the poor and rich, the subjugated and the elite. It led to what we have now. The mistake came in that The Genesis didn’t understand what the human brain was capable of. On Jerry’s twentieth year, his brain finally gained access to the chip. The Genesis created a one-way path, where information could only be pulled out of Jerry’s head, not the other way around. Eventually though, his brain rewired itself. Everyone still alive in the experiment had this happen, gaining access to that chip—which granted them a sort of hyper-intelligence. An awareness that the vast majority of humanity couldn’t hope to possess.

And in that moment, The Genesis decided the remaining five had to die. That intelligence, that awareness, coupled with humanity’s evolutionary drive to push forward would result in a much quicker destruction of the world. Four were killed.

Jerry escaped. He escaped and hid. A cyborg of sorts cast out from both societies, from The Genesis and humanity. The chip allowed him to perform surgeries on himself, to replace his heart with a machine, and then another machine when the first gave out. I’m not sure what percentage of him is actually flesh and blood anymore, but at over a thousand years old, I doubt it’s much.

Sixty or so years ago, Jerry found The Eight. They might have waited forever if not for Jerry; they might have waited out of fear of losing, from fear of their tiny kingdom carved out in the wilderness being decimated. They might have waited so long that they missed Caesar had Jerry not showed up. When he found The Eight and understood what they thought, what they felt, he realized he’d found what he was willing to die for. What he had done all of those grotesque surgeries for, replacing organs with machines. A thousand years was a long time to wait and he was done with it. He felt the person they needed, the one that could begin what The Eight had spoken about for the past two hundred years would be born soon. He saw into the future—not in any mystical sense—but he calculated out the probability of someone with the attributes they needed being born, and saw the decreasing chances with each passing year. As The Genesis evolved, humanity lost its chance to.

Jerry says there was talk of killing him. It had nothing do with his body composition; Many felt he wanted too much. Many felt he was inviting too much risk, tired of living himself, he was willing to risk everyone’s death.

He began his search anyway.

For thirty years, Jerry searched. He found ways to look at the tests The Genesis administered to the crops. He found ways to monitor what happened to the crops as they went out into the world. Always looking for patterns, for outliers, for those that might be doing something a bit different.

There were numerous possibles. All of them looked at closely and then passed over. Jerry could explain any number of reasons why they wouldn’t work, but it all came down to one thing, really. The strength to carry it out. The strength to go the distance, to make it to The Genesis and then do whatever necessary to kill it. The rest of The Eight lacked it, and as far as himself? The moment The Genesis located him, that chip in his brain would self-destruct.

The irony of Jerry’s search, for thirty years, was that he almost missed Caesar. Had he missed him, Jerry might have died still searching. Had he missed him, humanity would have gone on forever just as they are now, cattle bred for a specific purpose. To live. To stay inside their fences. Nothing else.

Jerry found Caesar through Grace.

If anything should get credit for humanity’s liberation, Grace has to be a contender.

It was the way she hid Caesar that alerted Jerry to it. It didn’t alert The Genesis because The Genesis wasn’t looking for the same thing as Jerry. The Genesis constantly hunted for the Unnecessary. That’s very different than hunting for a savior. The Genesis trusts applications to deliver up the Unnecessary. It trusts the processes in place. It trusts the Unnecessary to give themselves up, sooner or later, which most of the time they do. Grace, though—bless her—was different. She was special.

Perhaps humans and applications, humans and The Genesis, are very similar. Perhaps we’re all just made up of data. DNA. Memories. Beliefs. It’s all just data that we process and store. Humans store this data inside themselves. Sometimes they make copies, writing down their thoughts, but the vast majority of that data is stored in their minds. Applications don’t have that luxury. They’re connected, all the time. Their mind is The Genesis. Their storage shed is The Genesis.

Grace had to change that to save Caesar.

She had to build another place to store her data, because there wasn’t really any ‘her’ to put it inside. I don’t know how long she searched; I don’t know when either. Sometime after the girl she liquidated, and sometime before Caesar. She was planning, preparing for the possibility of the next child deemed Unnecessary. She wouldn’t put it on herself. Wouldn’t be the cause of that child’s death. So she needed somewhere to store her data, her thoughts, her life—at least the pieces she didn’t want to send back to The Genesis. She planned to partition herself, some of it going to The Genesis, the dangerous pieces going somewhere else. All of it accessible to her when she needed it, but both sides blocked off from the other. That was the hope.

She found what she was looking for inside a military bunker. Thousands of them lie beneath the Earth, all of them unused. Neither humans nor The Genesis have any need for them anymore. Grace, though, had a need. She found them, hacking into their mainframes that were still connected by ancient pathways to the net. She built logic and protocols into these pathways. Years and years she spent fortifying them. Preparing for a day that might not come. Preparing for the possibility that the little girl she killed would come back to her in another form.

When she received Caesar, there wasn’t any other work that needed to be done. There was only the decision whether to partition or not, and partition she did.

I can’t say Caesar is different than anyone to ever live. He would say he’s not. Jerry would say he is. Grace would say she loved him. Caesar’s ability to still his mind made it so that The Genesis couldn’t find him, but it made it so Jerry couldn’t find him either. He showed nothing outside to reveal himself as Unnecessary or savior. Besides his rise through population control, there wasn’t a single thing special about Caesar. He was average. Right up until he started talking crazy.

Jerry knew of him before that though, of course. When Caesar was twenty-five years old, Jerry found the military site Grace used. Accidentally. This whole thing, all of it is a string of luck that leads us right to The Genesis in the end. A string of luck that leads us to the end, really. Jerry wanted to find somewhere safer to house The Named. The Eight became The Named as Jerry built up the troops. He always believed he would find the person he was looking for, and he wanted to be ready when he did. So he took in those he found while searching.

Jerry wanted the world to know, when it was time, who did this. He wanted the world to either fear or cheer the group he assembled, but more importantly, he wanted them to know someone was fighting. Someone had said enough. Someone wanted change. Humans were an unnamed mass, the same as ants in a hill. Thus, The Named. For the first time in over a thousand years, The Named.

Jerry went underground, searching for these bunkers. All of Grace’s defenses were set up against an internal threat through the systems connected by wires. She didn’t expect someone to walk in the doors, hammering through the locks and stirring up the dust that had settled across the ancient, ancient equipment. But that’s what Jerry and his band of four explorers did. They found Grace. They found her information and they tapped in, externally, so that she couldn’t know.

He found Caesar there, in that old computer, every bit of information he could ever want about the young man. He found his hero, the one that would lead Jerry’s group, the one that might lead humanity if they wished it.

Let me take a second and comment on that.

Jerry did not care, in the slightest, if humanity wanted The Genesis or didn’t want The Genesis. Jerry, and The Eight before him, made their own decision as to whether or not The Singularity should exist. Humanity would go along, one way or the other. If they stood by The Genesis, then that would be dealt with. If they fought for Jerry, all the better. Jerry’s single-minded goal was The Genesis’s destruction. That was it. Nothing else mattered. Once The Genesis was gone, then humanity could be free to set their own destiny, but Jerry, The Eight, The Named, would not allow them to delegate that choice to another entity.

He found Caesar at twenty-five, and at thirty-three, the time had come to make a decision.

Chapter Forty-Three

“You were going to get yourself killed. That was as clear as anything. Something inside your head, I don’t want to say flipped on, but perhaps finally filled up. Grace couldn’t stop you.”

Caesar’s back rested against the chair. He still hadn’t glanced at Paige, but now he wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking about the past eight years of his life. He was thinking about someone watching him every single second. Not even The Genesis kept those kinds of tabs on people. The Genesis just waited on humans to slip up, eventually, if they were Unnecessary. This old man, though, this group—they watched. They studied him. All the way to this point.

“We saw the tests of the newest crop, saw who you would need to liquidate, and we intervened. We created an account for Paige, created a last name and identification numbers. Created a life for her and assigned the girl to her. I needed to see what you would do, Caesar. I needed to see if you would die for this girl.”

“Then why come to me on the train?”

“Because I wanted to frighten you. I wanted everything in your life telling you not to do it. The person I need, that we need, is going to have to look at the most powerful entity ever created and then, somehow, kill it. If you had listened to me on the train, had decided not to save the girl, I would have let you die. Eventually you would have said something too outrageous for April and she would turn you in and that would be the end.” The old man stopped talking and turned slightly like he was going to say something to Paige, but then faced Caesar again. “The plan was to remove you as soon as you did it. For Paige to take you and bring you here the same day. And if I’m being honest here, she messed up. That’s exactly what she should have done, but she didn’t. Go ahead and ask your question, though. Ask what you’re thinking.”

“The little girl didn’t need to die,” Caesar said. “Laura didn’t need to.”

“That’s what Paige thought too. That’s why you almost died. That’s why your parents died. The plan was to extract you but Paige tried to get the girl out. Tried to get her to us. She should have left the girl at a train stop and allowed The Genesis to run its course with her.”

Caesar looked up at Paige. Her eyes were dry and hard, but a sadness rested in them. A sadness that said, Fuck you. You don’t know anything.

“She almost got you and herself killed doing so. The applications got the girl and…the hell with it.” Jerry turned around to Paige. “Show him.”

Paige still looked Caesar in the eyes. She didn’t glance down at Jerry, didn’t question him at all. She turned around to the wall and lifted up the back of her shirt.

Stitches ran from the bottom left of her hip, across her kidney, to the top right of her shoulder blade. Long, black stitches that were pulled deep onto either sides of the slash, of what would turn into a scar that she could never hide, that would never fade. Red flesh outlined the entire wound, but it didn’t appear infected or inflamed. The pain though, the pain to stand up, to lay down, to move—every time she did anything with her body, that skin stretched. That wound rubbed against the meat beneath. The bones.

She pulled her shirt down and turned around, finding his eyes again. Fuck you. You don’t know anything.

“We’ve got her as drugged up as we can now, hoping infection doesn’t come, but she nearly bled out. She nearly died, all for that colorblind girl.” Jerry turned back around to find Caesar. “If The Genesis had killed you, I would have killed Paige myself.”

The room went silent and Caesar looked at the table in front of him. He’d listened for an hour, maybe more. He heard the story, heard his own piece in it. Knew what this old man, this cyborg, wanted from him. Now he knew that this old man would kill those he trusted most for a person he just met.

“My whole life has been spent searching for you. The past eight years, I’ve watched you, learning everything I could. I’ve studied you the way a scientist would an entity from another planet. I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to know whether you were the one I needed. You are, Caesar. All the rest of us, myself included, we’re fodder. We could all die tomorrow, and if you lived, there’d be a chance. We can’t go back. This wasn’t what we wanted, but we can’t change what happened.”

“Why did The Genesis kill them? Why not just end me?”

“The Genesis is worried about me. It knows what I’ve been doing. It knows what those before me have done. We’re nothing to it, just a necessary part of the process of correcting humanity. We are the few errors it makes and it feels when the time comes, if we ever decide to revolt, it will kill us swiftly. I suppose it thought you were a chance to get to me—because I’m the one that’s growing The Named.”

Jerry stood up. “It doesn’t know you like I do. You’re what I’ve waited for even when I didn’t know I was waiting for it. A thousand years I hid, having to cut my body up to keep from dying, wanting vengeance for what was done to me, wanting vengeance for what was done to all of us. You’re the culmination of three hundred years of thought, Caesar. You’ve got to make the choice, though. You’ve got to decide to come with us, to lead us. You’re parents aren’t coming back and neither is that little girl. Hate us, hate me, if you want. Hate me until this thing is over, and if I live through it, kill me. Just help me see it through.” He turned his head slightly over his shoulder and looked at Paige for a second. She turned from the room and left, closing the door behind her.

“You have a choice. I don’t know if I’ve left much of one for you, but it’s there. You can join us or you can leave. If you leave, I don’t know what you’ll do or what will happen to you. If you come with me, then we go to the end. The end is whether you die or it dies. Nothing ends until one of those things happen.”

Jerry smiled and looked at the ground, shaking his head. “Unfortunately, Leon doesn’t get a choice. You made the choice for him when you decided he lives. He’s stuck here. I don’t know what the hell he’s going to do. The average IQ here is around one-fifty and he’s sitting right at one hundred, but we’ll find work for him. It won’t be what he’s used to, but it’s better than the alternative. Paige went to get him now. Talk to him. I’ll return in a few hours. I’ll need your decision then.”

Chapter Forty-Four

“They’re not letting me leave, are they?”

Caesar shook his head.

“That’s what I thought,” Leon said. He walked over to the window, staring out at the desert before him. “Jerry said there are tunnels for miles underneath this place. An old military base.”

He listened but Caesar said nothing.

“I know the choice they put to you.”

Caesar still didn’t talk but what did Leon want him to say? Leon knew he wasn’t leaving this place. He knew now that he threw his previous life away the moment he told April. The only thing left to chance after that act was whether Caesar would kill him.

“I’m unsure whether to thank you or not. We both lost our families, and in the end I guess I’ll wear that guilt, but that doesn’t make my wife’s death any easier to handle. It doesn’t make me want to keep on living. I could probably ask Jerry to kill me; I doubt it would give him much grief to do it, but I’m too much of a pussy for that.”

The desert was a grim place. Leon didn’t know that until the past few days. Life was hard to come by in the desert, hard to sustain, hard to create. Life came easy in the cities. Sustainable, happy, easy life. April’s death, this entrapment, all of it had made his own life a desert. One where the heat beat down on him and ricocheted from the sand below, where shade was nonexistent, and water a luxury. He would keep going though. What other choice did he have? Caesar didn’t want him dead and he wasn’t going to kill himself; that left only life.

“What are you here for?” Leon asked. “They wouldn’t tell me anything about you, only that you got to decide if I lived.”

“You won’t believe it,” Caesar said.

Leon didn’t think Caesar was looking at him, thought he was most likely staring at the table. The levity that usually existed between them was gone. Maybe dead, maybe hiding, but gone for now.

“Well, why don’t you just tell me because there’s not much else to talk about.”

“That old machine—”

“Jerry,” Leon said without thinking.

“Yeah, Jerry. Basically, everyone here is smarter than anyone else on Earth. He gathered them. Found them, the ones The Genesis couldn’t find or kill, and brought them here. He was looking for me he says. I don’t know everything, but he thinks I’m to lead them.”

“Against?”

“The Genesis.”

Leon turned around and looked at the back of Caesar’s head. “To do what?”

“Kill it.”

Leon laughed. He laughed and then the entire room grew as silent as the desert outside, without even the wind to stir things. “Well, you’re wrong. I do believe you, at least I believe that’s what Jerry wants. He’s an idiot though. I don’t care how smart any of these people are here; he’s a goddamn idiot if that’s his plan.”

“You’re kind of tied to it now,” Caesar said.

“And I’m a goddamn idiot for getting myself in this situation.”

Caesar laughed and Leon couldn’t help but smile at the sound. It hadn’t changed in twenty years, his laugh.

“You believe him?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” Caesar said. “The things he did, I know all of that is true. I know that he killed your wife, he killed her assistant, and that in the end, my parents and the little girl, all their deaths rest with him too. He did it for a reason, whether or not the reason is crazy. I don’t know whether I can lead anyone or what his plan is for killing The Genesis, but there’s nothing back home for me.”

Leon turned back around and after a while asked, “What are you going to do?”

“What should I do?” Caesar asked.

“How do I know, man? I’m holding on because I don’t have a choice. Jerry hasn’t really given me one. If I was at home, sitting in my chair, I’d probably go back and forth to work and wallow around in depression for the next fifty years. Maybe I’d find another wife or maybe I’d be deemed Unnecessary. I only know what I’m doing now because I don’t have a choice.”

Neither said anything for a few seconds.

“I guess I’d ask you what you’re feeling, and I’d base it off that,” Leon said. He had felt anger when April relayed what she did. He felt murderous. Now, though, a week later, he felt nothing outside of a sadness that permeated every single cell in his body. The sadness felt like it would never lift, that his cells would never give up their hold on it. Living in this bunker or in a high rise back home, what did it matter? He had maybe another sixty years to live and then he would die. That’s what he felt like doing. Waiting on death.

“I didn’t do anything to anyone. I took one girl and I tried to keep her from dying,” Caesar answered. “I asked a few questions about why Cato should be so happy with being told where he would work his entire life. For that everyone I know is dead. For that, I have nothing left. You tell me if that seems like a just punishment.” Caesar looked up at Leon, his eyes full of tears.

Leon didn’t know the meaning of just. Intellectually, yes, but practically? Just was The Genesis. Just consisted of the things The Genesis gave humanity and the things it took away. Outside of that, how were humans supposed to decide such a thing? How was he?

“I don’t know, Caesar. I’ve never known the answer to those things.”

Caesar shook his head and turned back to the table. “It’s not. It can’t be. If there was justice, any semblance of it, I would be dead. Not them. They did nothing. They were Necessary. I’m the Unnecessary one. I’m here though, and they’re not.”

He stopped talking so long that Leon thought he wouldn’t continue again. He turned around and stared out the window. He’d be happy with this for now, as happy as he could be, sharing this room with Caesar and staring out the window.

“Someone dies for this,” Caesar said. “Someone is going to die.”

*

Jerry didn’t return like he said. A proxy came and took both Caesar and Leon out of the room. They walked down stairs and then through halls and halls and halls and finally came to a closed door that looked the same as every other door they had passed.

The proxy opened it and Caesar walked in, Leon behind him.

Jerry sat at a table, a book opened in front of him. Paige wasn’t in the room, but there were others, people that Caesar had never seen. He didn’t look at any of their faces. Just at Jerry.

The old man closed the book and looked up.

“I suppose I should meet the people I’m going to lead,” Caesar said.

Chapter Forty-Five

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

Why did Caesar choose the path he did?

A lot of this book is going to be the hows and the whats, but I think it’s important to understand the whys as well. Caesar may or may not change the entire world, that’s unwritten as of yet, but he chose a path that he didn’t have to. He went down it knowing that death waited at the end, knowing that there wasn’t any way he would survive.

I’m not sure I’d call it honor or character or anything so noble. A lot of people died because of his choice. A lot of people he loved. A lot more are going to die as well, people he doesn’t know and can’t know, but people nonethe-less. Maybe it’s the way this is going to end that is making me look at him differently. Maybe it’s because I see what’s going to happen and I don’t like it. Or maybe it’s because Caesar Wells isn’t a saint. He’s not some mythical figure to be worshiped. Maybe he’s just a man like the rest of us, and he has faults that plague him the same as all the rest of us.

I don’t know. I followed him. Others did too. So maybe if he’s got a lot of blood on his hands, then we do as well. Maybe all of us who went down this journey are to blame for what has happened and what happens next; we could have seen it, if we had looked.

We didn’t. We followed Caesar.

To be continued in The Singularity: Traitor…

The Singularity:

Traitor

by David Beers

Copyright © 2015 by David Beers

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Chapter One

“Who’s going to replace him?” A blonde haired woman asked inside the Population Control Board Room. She sat toward the end of the long, wooden table. She could have been as young as mid-forties or as old as mid-sixties, but with how serious her faced looked, mid-sixties seemed more probable. Eleven other people sat at the table and most of them looked down at their scrolls as she asked the question.

They didn’t have an answer.

It was their job to have one, but how were they supposed to make a decision like this? Caesar Wells had been easy, so easy that most people in this room thought that they might not have to make another choice regarding who ran Quadrant One’s Population Control Program for the rest of their careers. The man was young and should have lived a long, long life. The man was good at his job, too, so there wasn’t supposed to be any need to remove him. No, Caesar Wells should have been in place for a long time and the hardest decision anyone in this room should have made was whatever courses of action Caesar brought before them. No more would be expected.

Until now.

Because Caesar Wells went missing. Went missing six months ago, to be exact, and the people at this table put off the decision of who replaced him in every single one of those months. They met once a month and each month they tabled the succession discussion until the next. They couldn’t do that anymore, though, and they knew it. The Genesis wanted an answer from them, expected an answer from them. They couldn’t continue to shy away from this responsibility no matter how much they wanted to. No one sitting around the table wanted to be Unnecessary, and the only way they kept being Necessary was to make this decision. Who would replace Caesar Wells at the head of the ship? That’s what the blonde-haired woman wanted to know and what no one wanted to answer.

“I’m serious. If we leave here today without an answer for it, the composition of the people sitting around this table might look a lot different the next time we show up. We picked Caesar Wells and he was a great pick, so we can do the same thing again. There’s no reason to think we can’t, to be this scared of doing it.”

A man at the other end of the table looked up from his scroll. “You know we lucked out with Caesar. We didn’t so much pick him as he picked the job for himself and we went along because there wasn’t a single other candidate worthy of the position.”

“Fine,” the woman answered. “Maybe you’re right. Does that change what we have to do now, though? You all got the same message I did this past week. What did it say again?” She looked down at her scroll and blinked through a few pages until she got to the message she wanted. “There it is.’Your decision regarding the vacant job position should be made during the next meeting’. I’m sure the sender of the message was the same for all of us, right?”

The woman looked around the room, trying to find someone that would meet her eyes. A few people weren’t actively avoiding her, but most were staring down at the table in front of them, or out of a window, their eyes saying they were deep inside their own heads.

“Look,” the woman said. “Let’s just throw some candidates up on the wall and see what we think, okay?”

People nodded, either looking at her or at their scrolls, fine with the suggestion. Some movement, no matter how tiny the steps, was better than nothing. They knew that. The whole group knew that ignoring the message could make for a lot of vacant positions at this table, and occupied vats in another facility.

The wall at the end of the room closest to the blonde woman came to life, showing a face matched with biographical information to the right.

The blonde woman let out a small gasp. A man at the other end of the table pushed his chair back, standing up as he did, trying to move away from the face on the wall. None of them had ever seen something like it before. None of them had ever thought a face like that possible. It wasn’t…human.

An eye stared out at the group of people, the ones here to choose Caesar Well’s replacement. An eye that wasn’t colored with the blue or green or brown that one would expect, but with a thousand tiny black cameras, looking like the eye of a bug rather than a human. Skin didn’t surround that eye either, but a dull metal, which eventually gave way to flesh. It looked like the flesh had tried to grow up over the metal, wanting to cover the entire face as it was meant to do, but couldn’t. The face on the wall was an old man, or at least half of it was, and the other half was a machine, a grotesque thing not of a human’s womb or The Genesis. A half-breed, something that shouldn’t exist.

“What is that?” Someone said.

The blonde woman didn’t look for who spoke; she couldn’t take her own eyes away from the picture.

The half-breed’s mouth opened, which shouldn’t have been possible. This was a static picture, something from a database, something taken from the past—it couldn’t move because there wasn’t really an ‘it’ at all. And still, the man’s mouth opened slowly, revealing yellow teeth. He started to laugh, a raspy sound that made the blonde woman think about a broom sweeping over an old, wooden floor. The laugh started low, and over the course of ten seconds, grew across the speakers in the ceiling of the room, reaching a height that began to hurt everyone’s ears.

“TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF, DAMN IT!” Someone shouted.

The blonde woman broke from her trance of staring at the face that shouldn’t be moving, but was, his mouth going up and down as he chuckled that raspy laugh into the room. Her fingers started flying over her scroll, trying to remove the face, trying to get some semblance of normalcy back into this place.

And then the laughter stopped. The face didn’t disappear, but a deep silence fell across the room, as if they all sat in a forgotten pit, where not even bugs scurried through the dirt.

And then, in a voice that they all knew, that they all had heard time and time again in this very room, a voice that couldn’t have been anyone else but Caesar Wells: “Time to die.”

The fire came from beneath, came from the floor, and those that were scared of making a choice were briefly scared of the heat and force coming from below them, and then they were scared no more.

*

The Genesis’ Official Release

Twelve people died forty-eight hours ago in a freak accident, in which old wiring underneath the floors of a building frayed and a fire started. The twelve dead served the people of Quadrant Two unwaveringly for years. The Genesis offers its deepest condolences to the victim’s families.

There are rumors that this was a planned act of terrorism, that some group created this explosion and killed these people. That is categorically false, and the appendix accompanying this release will show the blueprints of the destroyed building, as well as the wiring plans that caused this tremendous accident. It is important that we all remember accidents can happen, regardless of whether humanity is in charge, or The Genesis, and also important to realize that we’ve had no other accidents resembling this in the past thousand years. An evaluation of the wiring team has already started, to see where there are weaknesses in our process and to discover what mistakes were made and by whom.

The report should be finished by noon next Friday and available for the public at the same time.

Chapter Two

Caesar looked at The Genesis’ release.

His scroll showed the same thing that the rest of Earth’s citizens would be getting this morning, the only difference was he had to hack in to get it, rather than having it pushed to him. Nothing else was pushed to this scroll, not now, nor ever again. Anything he wanted that regular citizens received daily, he had to perform some digital acrobatics to read.

This was good, this press release. The Genesis didn’t lie, not unless it absolutely couldn’t help from doing so. In all the books Caesar had read, he rarely saw a time when The Genesis wasn’t completely honest with humanity. Perhaps sometimes it hinted at something that might not be true, but this? No, it never did this. It never sent out a completely false release. Saying something it knew not to be true, something that was demonstrably false with any kind of rudimentary investigation. For the first time, maybe ever, The Genesis was lying to humanity.

Caesar pushed the scroll away and stood up from the table inside his room. The soup he grabbed this morning sat at the corner of the table, a spoon inside the bowl, but barely touched. Forty-eight hours ago he hadn’t been able to eat for a very different reason than this morning. Now, he was excited. Then, he’d been horrified.

Forty-eight hours ago he sat in a room with nine people and watched twelve other people sit around a long wooden table that he once knew well. He watched twelve people that he once thought of, if not as friends, then certainly professional acquaintances. Twelve people he reported to for years, twelve people who had listened to his guidance and allowed him to hold the title that his friends and family respected so much. He watched them all stare at Jerry’s twisted face and then watched as they exploded. He watched as fire erupted from the bomb packs his group had intricately placed underneath the floor, watched as their faces morphed from surprise into pain, and then as fire scorched their bodies and explosions blew off their limbs. He watched people he once knew die in an inferno of pain.

He hadn’t eaten for two days prior to that and the soup in front of him now was the first thing he’d attempted since the explosion.

It sickened him to watch those people die, but he knew it had to be done. They were cowards, all of them—Jerry was right about that—unable to even make a choice of who would replace him. More, none of them cared in the slightest about him. They cared about what he could do for them, the fact that he had allowed their lives to move along so peacefully without ever really having to worry about the crops that grew up under their purview. Did any of them mourn his disappearance? Did any of them mourn his parent’s death? No. Of course not. None of them cared in the slightest about what had happened to Caesar; he was gone and their life would be harder because of it.

That wasn’t why they had to die, though—was it?

That’s just you rationalizing what you did. You stole their lives from them and you didn’t do it because they didn’t care about you as a person; you did it to incite a panic. You did it to let the world know you’re coming.

And now, you’re a murderer.

He looked at the bowl of soup, steam rising up in distorted waves.

A murderer. That was a new word. One that he had used to describe The Genesis. One that he had even used to describe Jerry, both aloud and in his own head. Himself, though? No. He hadn’t been a murderer. Not ever. Wasn’t possible. Except now, it described him too. He had planned out in intricate detail how those bombs would explode, when they would explode, and knew the amount of heat each one would generate, knew that no one would survive inside that room. He did it all knowing that at the end twelve people would be dead.

And he knew a lot more people would die before this ended.

He remembered the past six months, but not exactly in chronological order. Everything moved so fast that his mind categorized it all by things he needed to know and then things that he could remember if he wanted to but held no dominance in his life. Six months of learning about everyone inside The Named, all one hundred and thirty people. Learning their history. Learning about Jerry, about Manny, even about Paige. Six months culminating in the murder of twelve people, and now here he was, two days later, unable to eat.

Except he didn’t feel guilty about it. Different, yes, but not guilty. He felt like things were about to start moving, and fast. The Genesis put out that statement to help avoid panics, but it wouldn’t work. The Genesis didn’t allow faulty wiring and the citizenry wouldn’t believe it, not fully, not everyone. Something happened in that building and people knew it. Even more, after The Named finished what was happening today, they would know who made it happen, too.

“Caesar, you up?”

Jerry’s voice spoke from the intercom, filling Caesar’s room.

Caesar walked to the wall, missing the conveniences The Genesis had provided him with—the ability to respond to things like this without having to move. “Yeah, I’m up,” he said, pressing the intercom button.

“Come down to my room. I want to ask you something.”

Caesar heard the click as Jerry turned his side of the conversation off; Jerry wasn’t happy, that was clear even over the intercom. He’d probably seen The Genesis’ release, but they both knew that was coming. This was about something else. What would make the old man sound like that?

Caesar picked up the bowl of soup and dropped it off in the communal kitchen before making his way to Jerry’s quarters.

*

“Come in,” Jerry said from the other side of the door.

Caesar twisted the doorknob and opened it, walking inside and closing it quietly behind him. He didn’t come into Jerry’s room much. Maybe three times in the past six months? And that was usually to get something from him, something that Jerry wanted him to look at or read. He’d never come here to talk. When they spoke it was in the ‘war room’, a name Jerry created for their conference room, or on long walks out in the desert. This part of Jerry’s life was the most private part of the man, kept away from anyone in The Named. Not by any written rules, just…well, Jerry didn’t invite anyone in here.

“What’s going on?” Caesar asked as the door clicked closed behind him.

“I’m about to do something stupid as hell,” the old man answered.

The room was dark and Jerry sat on a couch in the corner. The only light that filtered in came from the window, where the shades were drawn.

“Tell me you’re not hung-over or something, sitting here in the dark like this,” Caesar said as he made his way over to a chair.

“A little bit. I drank more than I should last night.”

“What for?”

“Because of what I’m about to do.”

Caesar didn’t say anything. He knew the old man called him in here to talk and would when he was ready. Caesar thought Jerry crazy when he first arrived, but no longer; he was almost as old as The Genesis itself, and over seventy percent of his body made of machine. The skin covering him even had mechanical pieces interwoven through it, keeping it from simply dying or growing so cracked it would look beyond grotesque. Caesar had grown to respect Jerry, and more, to like him. He wasn’t sure that he was the person Jerry thought he was, in that he didn’t think he was the only person in the world that could lead the charge they were mounting. But when you’ve lived a thousand years, you have to find something to live for—so, Jerry created Caesar. Created an almost mythological man that would kill the thing that created Jerry himself. Caesar was going along because he had reason to, not because he thought himself that mythological man.

“What did you think of Grace? Of your assistant?” Jerry asked, his metal eye almost completely shrouded in darkness.

How long had it been since he thought of Grace? The application that tried so hard to keep him from saying the things he thought. That tried so hard to keep him safe for so many years and then died because of him. The Genesis destroyed her as easily as it destroyed his family. He probably hadn’t thought about Grace since his first month here, when he tried to force all of those memories away. He couldn’t focus on them anymore, not if he wanted to keep going. They would drown him, watching his brother’s hand melt over and over again in his head. He couldn’t move forward, not effectively, if he thought of those things. So Grace had been pushed aside just like the rest of his family.

“She was a good application,” Caesar said. “She deserved better than me.”

“She kept you safe for a long time, didn’t she?” Jerry asked.

Caesar nodded. “Yeah. She died because of me. Five hundred years gone.”

“Do you miss her?”

“What’s all this about? What does Grace matter to anything?”

Jerry sighed and stood up from the couch. He moved slowly, not quite as slow as a man his age should, but close. He walked over to the windows and pulled back the shades. His eyes squinted as he looked out into the morning desert. “I can bring her back, Caesar. I’ve been able to bring her back since we first brought you here, but I haven’t. I don’t want to. It’s dangerous, riskier than almost anything else I’ve done, but…if you want her back, I’ll get her for you.”

“Why?” Caesar asked, still in his chair. “Why now? Why not six months ago?”

“Up until the last forty-eight hours, everything was theoretical. Whether or not you would go through with it, whether or not you had the balls to actually kill. I thought you did, of course, but I couldn’t know, not for certain until it was done. Others in here will kill, but not all of them, and the ones that will aren’t you. They’re not the person to lead us. I guess after last night, I just feel like if you want some piece of your life back, some part of the past, and if I can give it to you, I will.”

“How?” Caesar asked. He knew The Genesis would have killed her, that there wasn’t a chance in all the world that she could have made it through the purge of Caesar Wells.

“She hid herself in the same place she hid all that knowledge about you. She’s here, in this base, in the computers underground. She probably thinks she’ll never get out, that she’ll be forced to travel the wires down there for eternity, but that’s still probably better than dying. Or at least she thinks that right now, she might not in another five hundred years.”

Caesar opened his mouth, but found no words.

“I thought about killing her. Just shutting down the whole system. There’s really no need for it anymore, but I didn’t. I left her in there and now that it’s clear you’re in this for the long haul, I’m doing the most dangerous thing I think I ever have and asking you if you want us to bring her back?”

Bring Grace back? In his past life, Caesar didn’t really believe it was possible to live without her. She did everything for him. Cooked. Cleaned. Monitored his work. And now for six months, he’d lived as humans had a thousand years prior. He’d lived without an assistant and things went on the same. So he didn’t need her. He could keep going on the same way he did now and he would be fine with that. Even more, Grace couldn’t do as much here, in this place. She was so effective in the city because she was connected with everything in the city. Here, Grace would be connected to nothing.

And what does that matter? He asked himself. Because she won’t be able to help you now, she has no reason to exist? Is that what you’re sitting here thinking?

She did her best to deliver him from himself. To keep him from killing himself at points. Or maybe that was what she did in her entirety, if he got right down to it, kept him from suicide. And now her life was in his hands; he could grant her life or move on with his own, without her. Grace had outlived her usefulness. She would be more of a hindrance now, not a boon to what he was trying to do. Her connection to The Genesis surely would be severed, and if not, if she was still connected, then their operation was over completely.

Is that how you treat your friend? His father said. Sam. His dead father.

He wanted me to love Grace in a way that I never did. Because she kept his son safe.

Speaking to Jerry’s back, Caesar said, “Yeah. Let’s see what happens. She deserves that much, at least.”

*

Leon looked at the two men standing next to the mainframe. This room still got to Leon, still made him stare in almost reverent awe at what had been done long before he ever lived. He felt like he was looking at cavemen’s drawings, of primitive people doing the best they could. How were they able to build this without The Genesis, how were they able to create something that an application could still use all those years later?

The computer was huge in a way that planets feel huge. The room didn’t hold the computer; the room was the computer. The data entry point stood in the center of the room, and long rows of computers backed away from it, creating what amounted to multiples of human brainpower.

“She’s in there?” Caesar asked.

Jerry nodded. He didn’t look well. Caesar had told Leon about a man named Socrates, and Leon thought that old philosopher might have looked similar to Jerry right before he drank the hemlock.

“How?” Leon asked. In his first month living here, he got over the self-consciousness of his brain’s ability versus everyone else’s. To be frank, he just didn’t give a damn. They were making him stay and that meant they would deal with his questions. Maybe these two had figured out exactly what was going on, but he hadn’t, and he didn’t want to stand here staring at something he didn’t understand.

Jerry didn’t look over at him. He rarely did, at least not when other people were in the room. Sometimes when they were alone—which was rare now—Jerry would talk with him the way he had when Leon first arrived as a prisoner. Now, though, Leon was less than a prisoner, he was a nuisance, and that was fine too. Because really, fuck Jerry.

“The same way she sent all of Caesar’s information over here. She followed the same pathways except instead of information, she sent herself through the metal wires. The computer has been on since she started carving out the space for the chance that she might meet someone like Caesar, and now she lives in it too.”

“Where, though?” Leon asked.

Jerry glanced over his shoulder, his right eye black and emotionless, but his left saying he was tired of these questions.

“All through it, Leon. She lives in the wires, in the chips, the same as any other computer program.”

“How is that living?” Leon asked.

“Enough,” Jerry said, and Leon shut up. He knew how far he could push Jerry and didn’t venture past that point. He had no doubts of why he was kept around: Caesar. There wasn’t any other reason for him to be here, no other uses, and if he went too far, maybe Jerry would decide that Leon wasn’t worth keeping around, not even to make Caesar happy.

That won’t happen, a piece deep inside his mind said. For that old cyborg over there, happiness begins and ends with Caesar. The sun rises and sets on Caesar.

“How do we get her out?” Caesar asked.

Leon was surprised he was considering it. Leon never grew close with his own assistant, not like April (and don’t start thinking about her, not right now) had with hers. But, his assistant never did for him what Grace did for Caesar. Grace gave her life for the man supposed to lead them, and still, he didn’t think Caesar would do this. To Caesar, she had always been just another part of The Genesis, no matter what she did.

“This,” Jerry said, holding up a glass container. It was shaped like a bullet, the bottom flat with a curved top. A straight and stiff input cable grew out from the top, looking like it plugged into somewhere. “We put it in here,” Jerry said, tapping a piece of the machine, “type in some words on that keyboard, and with any luck, she’ll end up in this bottle. We open the bottom, and she’s free.”

“If there’s no luck?” Caesar asked.

“Then she’s either stuck in there, or most likely, dies somewhere in between the mainframe and our world,” Jerry answered.

Caesar nodded, showing no emotion. “Let’s have at it, then.”

Jerry stepped to his right and looked at one of the huge mainframes lining the walls. He traced his fingers along the levers, buttons, and lights—none of which Leon even pretended to understand. Finding the thing he wanted, he took the tube he held and plugged the wire into the machine, then stepped back.

He went to the keyboard sitting in front of a small monitor, looking dwarfed compared to the rest of the room, to the rest of the computers. He started typing and he went at it for a good five minutes with the two of them standing and watching him. No one spoke during those five minutes, not even Leon.

“Alright,” Jerry said. “Do you want the honor or should I?” He looked back at Caesar.

Caesar stared at the monitor, the green words across it seeming to enrapture him, like he was seeing a sunrise for the first time. “I’ll do it,” he said, finally, and stepped forward.

“Just hit that button and we’ll see if this works,” Jerry said, pointing.

Leon honestly didn’t think he would do it. Caesar…he just didn’t care about anything from The Genesis. It was all the same, all a piece of a monstrosity that ruled humanity, and now, even worse, had destroyed everyone he cared about. So why did Grace deserve to be out when his family had already been fed to those still living? Why did she deserve life when no one else he loved had been granted it? Leon knew how he would answer the question—because she hadn’t a thing to do with that murder, obviously. Caesar though, Caesar held grudges. Caesar hated. And Leon, even now, staring at his friend as he approached the keyboard, felt that hate probably extended to Grace. Extended to him, even, in a way. That hate burned as hot as the desert sun outside.

And still, Caesar hit the button Jerry pointed to.

They all turned and looked at the glass tube. A small hum started at the back of the monitor and then spread, making its way throughout all the computers, gaining in volume too, becoming louder and louder as it moved around them, surrounded them, indeed, took over the room. The hairs on Leon’s arms stood up and he felt goose bumps rise on the back of his neck. There was something creepy to it, creepy to hearing this machine come alive. They lived their lives in this desert without the need for computers, for the most part, without the need for machines. And here, they witnessed one turning on, starting up.

Was that how the scientists who created The Genesis felt when it was first born? Was there a humming like this?

The sound went on, growing in strength and intensity for a few minutes, and then it was over. The glass tube hanging from the outlet Jerry had shoved it in, but nothing resembling life inside it.

“Is she in there?” Leon whispered.

Caesar didn’t wait for anyone else, he moved across the room, speaking as he did, “I can unplug it, right?”

“Yes. You should be able to.”

He reached forward and pulled the glass bullet from the computer, twisted the bottom, and then Grace was in his ear. Leon couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought for the first time in his life, he might have heard an application crying.

Chapter Three

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I didn’t realize it at the time, but bringing Grace back…

It was Jerry’s way of showing his commitment to Caesar. It was something he wouldn’t have done for anyone else in that compound, something he wouldn’t have even considered. To Jerry, applications were an abomination. He didn’t hate them, not like Caesar did, but he saw them as something worse than himself even, a different kind of Frankenstein. His own version of the legendary monster was truer to the story. He was a mixture of machine and human, of computer and man, but his mind was driven by his humanity. His mind, and that was what counted to Jerry, was human—not computer, not The Genesis, not machine.

Applications, Grace as well as the rest, were different. Not even a Frankenstein at their core, just something pretending to be one. Grace wasn’t human, no piece of her, but yet The Genesis made these things to act like humans, to have human emotions, to copy us. And the early adaptations were so far off they were comical. Applications that couldn’t put inflection into their voice, that no matter how they tried to show emotion, it sounded like someone reading a set of note cards, one word after the other, without a care as to what they really said. The Genesis improved upon those applications, upgraded them, but could they ever truly encapsulate the human experience? Could they understand pain? Could they understand loss?

Jerry would say no.

Grace would say yes.

So when he allowed Caesar to bring her back, it wasn’t a meaningless gesture. It was on par with allowing Caesar to kill me or let me live. It was all Jerry could give him.

And what about Caesar’s change? Why did he bring her back? He had lived his entire life with a sort of disdain for Grace, a necessary if unwanted part of his life. All the time she spent begging him to stop his talk, to quiet down, to spare both of them what was sure to come, and he had ignored her. He had acted like she didn’t exist, like her life wasn’t tied up in his own. Only, that’s not completely accurate. He knew and openly admitted her life was tied with his own, he just didn’t care. To him, he owned his life, and if she was stupid enough to tag-along, then the fault lay on her. He wasn’t responsible.

Yet, he pressed the button and freed Grace from the bottle.

Caesar did a lot of horrible things in his life, most of them after his parent’s liquidation—maybe all of them. That though, freeing Grace, that has to redeem him for some of it. It has to. Or is that just wishful thinking from me? Am I wanting some way to forgive him for the things he’s done? Maybe, but so what? He did give Grace her life back, the same as he gave me mine. What was that old saying from The Bible? The Lord giveth and The Lord taketh away? Caesar had always been Grace’s Lord and he became ours as well. Maybe it is just, what he’s done. Maybe I don’t have any right to criticize him.

Jerry could have kept silent about Grace. He could have let her live her life out in that machine or just turned the whole thing off and Caesar would have never known. Or Caesar could have said no, he didn’t need Grace anymore; he didn’t want to see her ever again. They made two choices that will help define their legacy, even if in a small way.

Caesar accepted Grace. He accepted her for what she was, for what she could never be. Maybe, he appreciated her as well.

Jerry put everything at risk to make Caesar happy. To bring him perhaps some joy to bridge the pain he’d dealt with and the pain that was on the way. Because it was coming; it was inevitable.

Chapter Four

“You’re okay?” Grace asked.

“How many times are you going to ask?” Caesar said as he moved down the hallway.

The application was almost in his ear, just like she had been for much of his life. He smiled as he walked down the hallway, and realized he couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled because of Grace. The last few years of his life had been a long growth of distrust for her, of resentment. Right up until the end. Right up until his previous life ended and this new piece began.

“I’m sorry. I just…I never thought I’d see you again. I never thought I’d see anything again. I was working on finding a way to shut the computer down, to just turn off the power completely.”

“Why not just try to direct yourself to The Genesis? Wouldn’t it have deleted you?” Caesar asked.

“Sure, but then it would have found everything about you. I thought you were dead but it didn’t deserve to know what I did. If I deleted myself, it wouldn’t get to you, to what I knew about you.”

Caesar blinked, feeling water spring to his eyes. He’d thrown her to the wolves. He took something that cared about him more than life itself and discarded it like decade old news.

“Your parents—how are you feeling about them? Really?”

He told her everything over the past day, everything that he could anyway. The basics of what happened after they were separated, the basics of what happened once he arrived here. The basics of Jerry. She knew more about him, though, than Caesar did. She knew about the original plan, the first iteration of The Genesis’ attempt to save humanity. All applications knew Jerry still lived, but thought him like some kind of Big Foot monster, something that people might say they’ve seen, but could never prove. Hell, he might have died actually. The Genesis never put any information out about him, never mentioned him at all.

All while he’d been organizing this rebellion out here in the desert.

“I don’t want to talk about them right now.”

“Okay,” she said. “Leon, how’s he doing?”

“You’re extra gabby. Even by your standards.”

“I’ve been locked up in a cage for six months. What did you expect?”

“I’m going to have to lock you back up,” Caesar said, smiling.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I need to talk to Jerry.”

Grace went silent then, following Caesar down the hall. He found the room Jerry was supposed to be in and opened the door without any thought to what might be behind it.

Paige lay face down on a table, her shirt off. Jerry stood above her, his left hand holding a bottle of yellowish paste and his right hand covered in it. He looked up and Paige turned her head to the door.

Caesar’s eyes went to her back. He hadn’t seen the wound besides the first time he arrived. Hadn’t really even thought of the damage she took six months ago, of what it might feel like or have done to her. The wound hadn’t healed, not completely. The top and bottom of the slash was fine, but the center still made a hole across her back, the black stitches looking fresh, as if Jerry had just changed them out. The skin was red though, seriously so, although there wasn’t pus or anything else leaking from the torn flesh. Just a red, inflamed growth that spread around the still unfixed skin.

The wound looked greasy, but that was only the salve Jerry had on two of his fingers.

“They cut her with something that isn’t allowing her skin to heal. The two flaps of flesh aren’t recognizing each other, it’s like each one thinks it’s speaking to a piece of metal, rather than her own body. It won’t grow over.”

Caesar swallowed.

Paige said nothing, only looked at him standing at the door.

“Are you going to be alright?” Caesar asked after a second, unsure of what else to say. A wound that wouldn’t heal? How could anyone be okay with that? That meant death. Wounds that wouldn’t heal meant the body died, because if it didn’t heal, it got worse; it grew infected until it killed the host.

“We don’t know yet,” Jerry answered for her. “She’s fighting off the infection well enough right now, and this salve helps, but if we don’t find a way to close up the hole, eventually her body will give up. There’s just too many pathogens in the air. Too much to get inside there and wreak havoc.”

Paige didn’t look any certain way about the whole ordeal. She stared at him with the same look a woman getting a massage might have had.

“I’m…I’m sorry for interrupting. Jerry, will you grab me when you’re done?”

“Sure,” he said, and as Caesar turned to leave Jerry bent back over his work.

*

“I just want to know what his plan is, that’s all,” Leon said. “It’s not an unreasonable request.”

Caesar took a sip of the coffee in front of him. He drank it all day, the only thing he’d tasted out here in this desert that tasted better than what The Genesis had fed him his whole life. The soup they ate daily, the meat they found out in the desert, all of it was bland, lean, and lacking any real refinement. The coffee though, beans Jerry grew himself, that was something different. That tasted as good as anything The Genesis had ever created.

“It’s not ready yet,” he answered.

“Then when will it be? I don’t understand why you trust him so fully, Caesar. I don’t understand why you follow him so blindly. You’re the leader here, at least you’re supposed to be, but we all dance to Jerry’s tune.”

“What should I do?” Caesar asked.

They sat in Caesar’s room; Caesar at a small table and Leon lying out across his bed. They spent a good bit of time in this room, talking, thinking. Before it had just been the two of them, but now Grace was here. Caesar had forgotten what that felt like, to always be watched, monitored.

“Ask him what the hell we’re supposed to do, maybe? It’s been six months, Caesar. Six months of sitting out here in this desert, meeting people, listening to people, learning, but nothing else.”

“Blowing up an entire room of people is nothing?” Caesar asked.

“So? What’s the plan with that? To let people know you’re here? That you’re planning on planning a revolution, because that’s what it feels like.”

Caesar smiled. Leon didn’t like Jerry and Jerry didn’t like Leon. Leon didn’t like Jerry because he killed Leon’s wife and Jerry didn’t like Leon because he’d almost gotten Caesar killed. They only tolerated each other because of Caesar.

“He’ll tell me when he knows. The past twenty years were spent looking for me; they didn’t spend time making a plan of what to do when they found me. Six months really isn’t that long of a time for what we’re trying to do.”

“All this brainpower and someone couldn’t think up what to do when they finally found you? They had to wait for you to get here to start considering that?”

Caesar laughed, bringing the coffee to his lips.

“You think Jerry would kill me if he heard me speaking to his Messiah like this?” Leon stared up at the ceiling but was smiling too. He changed his voice to mock Jerry. “No one speaks to our Savior like that. No one.”

Caesar stood up and walked to the bed, slapping Leon’s stomach weakly, causing him to half sit up in his laughter.

“You think he’s full of shit?” Caesar asked, standing next to the bed.

Leon’s smile faded and he went back to looking at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I don’t know because I don’t know what he wants to do, Caesar, and that’s my point. How can we know if you’re going to be good at any of this, how can we know if you’re supposed to be the one that leads these people to kill The Genesis? You’re smart, but what else? What are you going to do when the applications come? When you can’t see them and they clamp down on your arms just like they have the rest of the people they liquidated. You can’t even run from them because you don’t know they’re coming. Full of shit? I don’t know about that. He believes in you; I just don’t know if I believe in him.”

Caesar turned and walked to the small television in his room. He saw these for the first time when he showed up here. The Named had tooled with them until they were up and running. They watched different programs, different shows, whatever anyone could find on the net and then figure out a way to hook up to these ancient devices. Caesar spent some time watching because there wasn’t much else to do in the desert. Leon was right. They waited a lot. They waited on Jerry’s orders. They waited on a plan that was supposed to tell Caesar what came next.

“Are you scared?” Leon asked. “Of what he thinks you’re supposed to be, does it scare you that you might not be it?”

“No,” Caesar shook his head. He paused, thinking of how to say what came next. “I don’t have anything left to do. If I can’t do what he wants then I’ll die and that’s fine, to be honest. I don’t plan on this going on too long, if you really want to know. Whatever Jerry cooks up, we’re going against something that doesn’t know the word defeat. We’re going up against something smarter than all of us combined, something with unlimited resources. When you’re going up against something like that, the only thing to fear is death, and I’m more than ready to meet it.”

*

“An application, Jerry? Are you serious?”

Jerry kicked the sand at his feet. The small granules bounced a few inches and then lay still again, waiting on another object to move them. He didn’t answer Manny. He knew before he made his decision what Manny would think, what Manny would say. He knew it and made the decision anyway.

“I don’t get it,” Manny said. “You put us all at risk by bringing her back. Every one of us is now in danger because that application is here. How sure are we that The Genesis can’t reestablish a connection? How sure are we that the application won’t send information back to The Genesis, to try to make up for what it did before, to get back in The Genesis’ good graces?”

Jerry continued staring at the sand. Both of their backs faced the door to the bunker. It looked like a four bedroom house, with a flat roof. If someone were to walk up on it, they would have no idea that tunnels weaved for miles beneath their feet.

“Your wife, Manny, do you love her?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Manny asked.

“Do you? Do you love her?”

“Of course.”

“Your son? What about him?”

Manny didn’t say anything.

“You have them. Why can he not have this one thing? Why can he not have the only thing still left from his past? He has no woman, no children, no parents. Why deny him this one thing?”

Manny shook his head. “I just can’t believe it. Because that application goes against everything we’ve built in there. It is the antithesis of what we’re doing. It’s dangerous, Jerry. You could get us all killed trying to make that man happy. And more, how are you so sure he is the one we want? You told us all that he is, but how? I’ve listened, I’ve gone along, I’ve taught him, but we deserve more than your word on it. How do you know that you’re not putting us all at risk for someone that isn’t even what we need?”

And there it was, the question that had been bubbling up from the bottom of whatever ocean they all floated on. The issue that needed addressing but that Jerry didn’t know how to address without simply showing them. He knew because he knew the man down in those underground corridors. Jerry knew him the same as he knew himself. He knew what Caesar was capable of, what lengths he would go to, and what his mind would be able to do. He only needed to show Caesar it was possible. Caesar wasn’t The Genesis, but he was the closest thing to it that any of them would ever come across in human form. Not Manny, not himself, not anyone in the building behind had the potential Caesar did. But he couldn’t tell them that; they needed to see it. Then they would believe, but not before.

“In your interactions with him, what did you think, Manny?”

“He’s fucking smart. Is that what you want to hear? Sure. He might be smarter than any of us, even you. But that doesn’t make him the Second Coming. Being smart is necessary, it’s not sufficient.”

Jerry looked up from the sand and out at the mountains in the distance. His right eye registered moisture and from there the probability of rain. He could see a hawk feeding its children, dropping chunks of food into each of their mouths. That was one of the differences between Manny and he, that his eye allowed him to see and know things that someone not built like him just couldn’t. The other major difference was his span of life. Manny was in his forties, and it didn’t matter how brilliant he was, forty years of life couldn’t match a thousand.

“How long have you traveled with me, Manny?”

“A while,” he said.

“How long?”

“Twenty years or more.”

“Then will you go just another year? That’s all I’m asking. Just one more year and you can quit if you don’t like where we’re at,” Jerry said.

“I’m not…Jesus…I’m not saying I don’t want to follow you Jerry. I wouldn’t follow anyone else. I’m just wondering if this is the correct direction, if everything we’re doing is going to pay off, if you’re placing the right amount of trust in this man.”

Jerry turned his head to Manny. His second in command for ten years. The only other one who knew everything about this operation. If Jerry fell, The Named went to Manny. Not to Caesar. Not to anyone else. It went to the man next to him, the one now wondering if this entire plan had been wrong from the get-go. Because if Jerry had picked the wrong person, then he hadn’t adequately outlined the criteria of the person he needed when he started looking decades ago. And Jerry didn’t believe that, not in the slightest. He knew what Caesar was, knew what he would become.

“He’s the right one, Manny. He’s the only one that’ll be able to do this. Give me a year, that’s all I ask.”

*

Manny looked at his son lying in the crib. He slept with his tiny arms curled up near his face. Manny didn’t reach in to touch him though he wanted to. He couldn’t get enough of his son, couldn’t get enough of his smile, couldn’t get enough of the games the boy liked to play. Manny could hold Dustin forever, could look at him until the world entered another Ice Age. He didn’t know if Dustin would carry the intellect that he carried, and he didn’t really care either. Intellect was fine, but not having it was fine too. This wasn’t anything about building a race of intelligent people; that would be no different than The Genesis’ plan to build a race of average people. If his son ended up genius or handicapped, Manny’s love wouldn’t stop, and he only truly realized that the first time he held the boy.

He thought he had joined this group, The Named, for himself. To do what was right. To stop the oppression that was The Genesis. He realized now, though, that wasn’t true. None of this had anything to do with him; it was about Dustin. It was about his son growing up in a world in which he could do as he pleased, in which he determined his future, not some monolithic entity that he would never meet. All of this, everything Manny did now, including the conversation he just had with Jerry, was for Dustin.

He didn’t know what Jerry was doing anymore.

And that scared him.

Four years ago, before his wife, Brandi, before Dustin, it wouldn’t have scared him at all. Manny gave Jerry near implicit trust, or at least he had. Could he do that any longer, though? Could he continue to follow the man blindly, when he had people that now followed him blindly? He didn’t know, but he was beginning to think the answer was No.

Manny watched Caesar for the past six months. He’d eaten with him, studied with him, and planned for him. It wasn’t intelligence that mattered here, and Jerry knew that too. The person they were looking for needed an edge, needed an ability to take things to an extreme that The Genesis had nearly bred out of society. The person they wanted must be willing to kill the child lying before Manny if it meant he could then kill The Genesis. He didn’t see that in Caesar. He saw a man hurting. He saw a man full of anger. But did he see a sociopath? No. And that’s what they needed. Someone with sociopathic tendencies who could direct them toward The Singularity. Jerry had found someone intelligent, made him angry, but in the end that anger would fade and everyone involved in this would stand before The Genesis without a leader, without a person who had been willing to do what was necessary.

Jerry once thought Manny might have been that person.

Manny once thought he might have been that person, too.

Now he knew that he wasn’t the person for the job and he knew why. Jerry knew why. They both knew what it would take, something major that Manny turned down over ten years ago. He made the decision knowing what it would mean for his future, and he also made it knowing that Jerry was looking at this other person, this Caesar—studying him for the same reason that he once studied Manny, because there was potential. Because he might be the one they needed. Manny made his decision, and even now, looking at Caesar and watching Jerry gloat over him, he wouldn’t have made it any differently.

None of that changed the fact that Jerry might have made a mistake. None of that changed the issue that Caesar didn’t possess the right capabilities any more than Manny did. They were all hitching their wagons to a horse that would falter before it ever reached the final destination. Jerry didn’t see it. He couldn’t because he had searched so long for this man and now he saw nothing else but Caesar. Caesar Wells.

Manny had to be the one that guided Jerry now. That’s what he understood, standing there looking at his son. It wasn’t about him, about Manny; it was about Dustin. It was about Brandi. He had to do this for them because if they followed Caesar, they would all end up dead, liquidated and without a chance of ever turning the tide on the monstrosity that humanity created.

Chapter Five

Caesar was finally growing used to sand. He hadn’t ever seen it before Jerry brought him here. He knew what it was, of course, had read about it, but he’d never actually experienced it. He liked to walk barefoot over it, when he could find shade, otherwise the sun heated it to an unbearable degree.

He walked on it now, but wearing sandals. He could still feel the tiny grains as they flipped up from the ground and in between his foot and the rubber sandals he wore. It wasn’t the same as walking barefoot, but it worked. He could still feel the give of the earth beneath him and that was half of it. The way the sand moved when you walked on it, not holding firm like the streets he grew up walking on. There was give to sand. There wasn’t any give in the cities.

Caesar listened to Leon, but he didn’t buy into what he said, not completely. Leon wanted Jerry to give them direction, to tell them what was going to happen. Caesar…didn’t.

He wasn’t going to tell Jerry that, wouldn’t even tell Leon. He agreed to do something, agreed to take the reins of an organization he hadn’t even understood. He did it because he was angry and pained and had nothing else. There were talks between Jerry and he that Leon didn’t know about. That no one knew about besides the two of them. Conversations about what would most likely happen when things started moving. Conversations about killing people. The Council over Quadrant Two, that had been a test and Caesar knew it. Could he kill from a distance? He’d been able to. Those people, all of them were cowards, capable of nothing on their own. They would have thrown him to the wolves if it meant they could live an extra day. That was different than the kind of killing that Jerry thought this would lead to. That was different than holding a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger. That was different than killing children because those children had been armed and were coming at him.

In the end, Jerry thought The Genesis would use everything it had at its disposal to stop him. In the end, Jerry thought Caesar might have to destroy a large portion of the human race if he was to stop The Genesis.

And that was why Caesar didn’t mind waiting. He didn’t mind Jerry plotting everything out for a long, long time. Caesar was fine with dying, invited it really, but he didn’t know if he had what it took to kill a man while looking him in the eye.

“You will,” Jerry had said.

“And what makes you think that? I’m sitting here telling you I don’t think I can.”

“I watched you for a long time, Caesar. I watched you before you really even knew who you were. I watched you when you were a child. I watched you while I was watching others, watching many of the people that live here, that will serve under you. You’re the only one I’ve met that can do it. You don’t have to believe it now, just know that I do. You’ll do what is necessary when the time comes.”

Caesar thought his trust might have been misplaced. He thought the old man, the cyborg, might have made a mistake. He couldn’t tell Jerry no, though. He couldn’t tell him he was wrong, because the man had made his mind up. Jerry had made his decision on this rebellion long ago, Caesar was just filling his role.

He watched a rattlesnake slither across the sand, its tanned skin nearly blending in completely with the dust surrounding it.

That’s what Jerry wanted him to be. That snake rolling across the sand, single-minded on probably one thing during this entire day. Finding food. Food, that’s what Jerry wanted him to focus on. Finding prey and killing it. The rattlesnake had no problem with that. Even now, Caesar could look into the thing’s eyes and see no emotion. No fear. No love. Nothing but the reptilian brain that told it to feed and survive. Feed. Survive. When Caesar showed up six months ago, he thought he might be able to be that person. He thought he could be what Jerry needed, what he wanted, but he thought that because his entire family was ripped from him. Literally melted before his very eyes. Now though, six months later, did he feel the same?

“What are you out here for?” Grace asked.

He knew she was there. Always there, always listening. He resented it before, but now…

Now she wasn’t assigned to him by The Genesis. Now he assigned her. Now he brought her here, and still she chose to stay close to him. She could have followed anyone in this place, and with over a hundred people, she had plenty to choose from. She could have followed no one. She could have left completely and gone out into the world, lived anywhere she wanted outside of The Genesis’ grasp. Seen Earth in ways that no human or application ever would. She hadn’t though, at least not yet. So far she stayed with him, just as she had in their previous life.

“Wondering if I can be that snake over there, I suppose,” he answered.

“You think you can?”

She didn’t have to ask what he meant; Caesar understood that she knew him as well as he knew himself.

“No,” he said.

She didn’t say anything at first and they watched the snake slither into a hole it found in the ground, perhaps sensing a rodent down inside.

“I think you can. I think Jerry’s right. I don’t think it’ll be that hard of a transformation, really.”

“You think that highly of me, huh?” He asked.

“You sacrificed me for your thoughts easily enough. I think you can do it for others, too.”

Before Caesar could say anything, he heard the door open back at the bunker.

“Hey!” Someone shouted. “Jerry wants you, Caesar!”

He turned around and looked at the teenager standing in the doorway. His name was Pat.

Caesar didn’t say anything else to Grace. Instead he walked to the bunker to see what the old man wanted.

*

Caesar watched Paige walking down the hallway. They were going to get to the door at just about the same time unless he slowed or sped up, which he was wont to do. Things had been slightly worse than awkward between the two of them over the past few months. His anger at her subsided fairly easily; he understood why she did what she did, and understood now better than ever what it cost her. What it still might cost: her very life. And still, knowing that he had slept with her, had almost sacrificed himself for her happiness, for someone that didn’t really even exist—he couldn’t push past it. Couldn’t try to get to know the Paige that actually lived here. She didn’t seem to want him to either. Out of all the people he studied with, that he designed with, she was never one of them. Jerry kept them away from each other and Caesar hadn’t asked for that, so he could only assume she had.

He turned the knob on the door and opened it for her.

“Thanks,” she said, walking into the room before him.

It looked like Jerry was calling everyone, not just him, because he saw Leon turn into the hallway. Caesar let the door close and waited on his friend. Leon was invited to things because Caesar asked that he be. Jerry would have been more than happy to leave him mopping floors and cleaning dishes, maybe a little cooking every now and then, but Caesar wasn’t. Plus, everything Jerry said in their meetings, Caesar had to relay back to Leon, and that was a pain. So now, on anything important, Jerry acquiesced and let Leon come.

“What’s this about?” Leon asked as he neared Caesar.

“Don’t know. Pat just yelled at me to show up. Who told you?”

“Manny,” Leon said. “Hopefully he’s come up with some kind of plan.” Leon passed Caesar and pulled on the door, ready to walk in.

“Hopefully,” Caesar said quietly, following.

Paige had already taken her seat at the table—it was a flimsy thing, nothing like King Arthur and his knights that Caesar read about. It looked more like something you would use for a picnic seven hundred years ago, its age the same as most of the things inside this place, and held together by spare parts, tape, and a lot of care from its owners. Paige sat to Jerry’s left and Manny to his right, the same as they always did, in the center of the table. Leon and Caesar found their seats. Most of the people called for these types of things were here: Tim, Keke, Alex, Ryan, and Rebecca. The Eight. There were a lot of people in this bunker, but these were the eight that mattered the most, the eight that kept up the traditions, the original thoughts of the first. Ryan and Rebecca were the oldest, edging into their sixties. The rest ranged from mid-thirties to just below sixty, with Paige the youngest. The table once held just these eight, and before them, a different group of eight, but always that number. Leon and Caesar made it ten; two new chairs had to be pulled to the table for them.

“Thank you all for coming down here,” Jerry said once Caesar finally sat. “It’s a bit short notice, I know, but I wanted to give you the information as soon as I had it.”

A few people nodded and a few people said things like, “No problem.” Caesar remained quiet and watched the old man, the person who had become his mentor.

“We know what we have to do now, the first step on a long map. It took a good bit of time to even find these steps, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve waited so long since finding Caesar.” Jerry nodded in his direction. “I’m going to explain to you all what I’ve found out and then my suggestions for what we do. Then I want to hear what everyone thinks, okay?”

More nodding.

“The Genesis has made an application for nearly everything. What we once thought was a singular intelligence has morphed into an almost decentralized intelligence. There are applications like Grace, who I’m sure is buzzing around here somewhere, but there are also applications that act more as deposit boxes. The Genesis uses these things like a safe, it deposits information in them that it doesn’t want to keep, that might be too cumbersome for it. It’s hard to imagine the amount of information it must store, and some of these applications are nothing more than storage units, to keep from weighing down the central intelligence. There are literally applications that know only the culinary tastes of seventeenth century France.”

Someone laughed at the table, but Caesar didn’t look away from Jerry. It was coming. What they had to do. Jerry was explaining the background but what Caesar should do came next.

“Not all of the information housed in these applications is trivial, though. Some is quite important, and the applications created are well protected and well equipped to protect themselves. We’re looking for a specific one, one that holds information that relates to the centrality of The Genesis. We all know that The Genesis can live anywhere, can live in the air around us if it needs to, but that’s not the most efficient way for it to continue progressing. Spreading out like that causes lapses in communication, just in the simple time it takes for molecules to speak to one another. There is a central location that The Genesis lives at. This location, along with a near infinite number of other locations important to The Genesis is kept in one application. If we capture it and download what it knows, then we’ll know where to go. We’ll know where The Genesis lives.”

Jerry paused and looked around the table. No one spoke.

“There’s one person in the entire world that might be able to tell us where this application is. That’s how important it is. The person is named Gary Pierre and he works in Quadrant Three. His job is unique, and he might be the only human in the world allowed to live when he clearly doesn’t meet specifications. He’s autistic, has a near paralyzing fear of speaking to anyone, of being around anyone, of doing anything that is not completely solitary. The Genesis uses him specifically because of this; it uses him to process applications that it generates and to create their physical form. To take the code it spits out and build it into something that can traverse the world.”

“Why doesn’t The Genesis do it? Or use another application? Why use a human?”

Everyone at the table looked at Leon. Caesar wanted to smile, would have, if his brain wasn’t already leaping to the conclusion of Jerry’s talk. The answer to Leon’s question was obvious to everyone else at the table, which is why no one asked it but him, but Leon couldn’t help it, and didn’t care either. That was the funny part. Surrounded by a table of brains, Leon couldn’t care less about asking a question that everyone already knew the answer to.

Jerry stared at him for a second, his mechanical right eye not showing any of the emotion that his left one did. Jerry fought this war for Leon, but he didn’t like him sitting at this table.

“Compartmentalization. All applications are connected back to it, all of them, except perhaps Grace. That doesn’t mean that every application has the knowledge The Genesis has though, only that The Genesis has the application’s knowledge. If it were to allow another application to do the job that this man currently does, there’s a possibility of cross-pollination, of other applications finding out more than they need to. If The Genesis does the job itself, it’s wasting resources. This man, because of his mental problems, will never tell a soul. He will never ask for another job. The monotony of it attracts him and he’ll keep at it until he dies.”

Leon leaned back in his chair, nodding. “Makes sense,” he said, and Caesar finally smiled, covering his mouth with his hand.

“Glad we could fix that little problem for you. Now,” Jerry looked around at the others, “I propose that Caesar and I go find this man and we discover what he knows. He may know where the application is—it’s called The Tourist—he may not, but he’s our best chance. We leave tomorrow. It will take us a week to travel there and when we find him, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

Silence spread across the table as he stopped speaking, everyone digesting the words. Their leader and the man who was supposed to lead them, both going, the rest of the eight left here alone.

“Why you?” Manny asked. “That’s too dangerous, Jerry. Caesar can go alone or someone else can go with him, but why would you go?”

Jerry turned and looked at his second in command. “I’ll be fine. He’s going to need guidance and there’s no one better to give it to him than me.”

“And what if The Genesis figures out you’re there? It’ll zap you the moment it knows,” Manny responded.

“I’ve gone into cities before, Manny. I went in to get you, didn’t I?”

“That’s different. It wasn’t alerted to you then. You just killed a group of its highest ranked people; it’s looking now.”

“Who would go instead?” Jerry asked.

“Me. Paige. Any one of us.”

Jerry looked away from Manny. “What do you guys think?”

“You should go with him,” Paige said, but not looking at Jerry, staring at Caesar instead.

“I’m with Manny,” someone else said. Caesar didn’t know who because he couldn’t look away from Paige. She didn’t avert her gaze even as other people spoke, giving their opinion on the proposal. Her eyes weren’t hard, not like normal, but they weren’t soft either. They questioned, somehow asking something of him, something that he couldn’t make out. But she asked anyway, and maybe in that question, there was sadness too.

“Can we take a vote?” Manny asked, pulling Caesar from his gaze.

“No,” Jerry said. “Not this time. The Genesis won’t find me because it has no idea we know about Pierre. There are things I’m capable of that no one else in this room is, either, and you all know it. There’s a protection factor as well.”

Caesar watched as Manny turned his eyes on him. “What do you think? Do we send him with you?”

Caesar looked around the table, everyone’s eyes on him now for perhaps the first time since he arrived. Jerry had made his pitch, had done his best to say that it would be the two of them, but no matter how much he wanted to go, it would come down to a vote if that’s what The Eight wanted. There was no dictatorship here. He couldn’t make decrees. Caesar though, he would be the swaying factor. Did he take their leader, the one who created all of this, and risk both of them dying at the same time?

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll be okay.”

Chapter Six

The time for truth was almost upon them, and Jerry knew it. No one else did, of course, but then it wasn’t their job to know. They trusted that Jerry had picked the right person, despite Manny’s words this morning, and they were going to go along with that choice. It was Jerry’s job to make sure, though.

The ends justify the means. An ancient philosopher once said those words, and Jerry didn’t think a truer thought had ever floated through another person’s mind. He had known for some time what would have to happen, he just didn’t know how he could make it happen. Jerry had witnessed Caesar sacrifice himself for his beliefs, but he hadn’t witnessed him sacrifice someone else. Sacrificing oneself was important; it showed a level of dedication that most people wouldn’t match, but Jerry didn’t want Caesar doing that. He needed Caesar to be there at the end.

He still wasn’t one hundred percent sure how he was going to put Caesar in the right situation, but he knew the autistic wasn’t going to live through this. One way or the other, Caesar would have to kill during this trip.

Chapter Seven

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

Caesar didn’t know what he was doing when he said those words. How could he? Jerry’s faith blinded Caesar to everything else. Jerry’s faith that Caesar would march them right to The Genesis’ doorstep and then kick in the door. The rest were supposed to believe in him too. That was what Jerry built in that bunker, a group of people searching for a savior, searching for someone who would do what the rest of them could not. Except, he hadn’t. Not quite. Or rather, he built a group of people searching for a savior, but perhaps not the one he brought them.

When Caesar made that comment, he sealed a lot of fates. A lot of people died because of that.

And what else could he have said? Allow someone else to come with him? Jerry was the only person at that table who had any idea what this task would take, and the reason he didn’t lead them all the way himself was because, at some point, The Genesis would locate him if he pushed far enough, and the entire operation died as soon as that happened. No, Caesar knew he needed Jerry there. And Jerry knew it too. Jerry had to see if Caesar would do what was necessary when the time came and this was the opportunity. Jerry had his beliefs, but he still needed proof. For himself and for the others.

So Caesar told the group that Jerry should go. That they would be okay. Because Caesar needed Jerry.

Others needed Jerry too. That’s what he didn’t understand, I suppose. Others needed him just as much as Caesar, and in many ways, more so.

I look back at these things now and I go back to what I thought. Fuck, Manny. I remember thinking that distinctly, for challenging Jerry, and in doing that challenging Caesar’s importance. I was so incredibly dense, so caught up in my own ego, so focused on the mistreatment I was subjected to. What mattered was Caesar and I, everything else filled in the gaps. I should have spoken up—even if it would have done little—should have said something to keep Jerry from going, to let Manny go, or anyone else for that matter.

But that’s just wishful thinking, I suppose. Wishful thinking that isn’t logical. If Jerry hadn’t gone, there would be no Caesar, not as the world knows him today. There would have been my friend, I suppose, but then we would have never stood a chance. That’s the paradox. If Jerry stayed, then people lived—a lot of them. If he stayed though, nothing changed. Ever. Maybe it still doesn’t, but we had a chance, goddamnit. Caesar gave us a chance even if he ends up throwing it all. All this time on my hands now, just waiting for word of the end, and I have nothing else to do but sit here and think about the what-ifs. So many of them.

People followed Caesar. In the end, we all followed him because Jerry was right. The difference though, between the two of them, was that people loved Jerry. They followed Caesar, but they loved Jerry, and somehow that combination killed a lot of people that didn’t deserve to die.

Chapter Eight

Gary Pierre looked out his window at the street before him. The window, of course, was one way, so that he could see out but no one could see in. When he didn’t want to see out anymore, he hit the button on the wall and the inside of the window turned black as well, so that the view was blocked from both sides. Most times he liked both views blocked. He didn’t want to see out any more than he wanted people seeing in.

Today was different though. Or rather, the past week had been different. He didn’t know it for quite a few days, of course, because he hadn’t bothered to check. However, the streets were empty. Almost completely so. The first time Gary looked out he had expected to see trains and people and the general hustle of everyday life outside his apartment. He hadn’t though. He’d seen a single train, sitting at the curb, with no one entering or exiting. No one had been on the streets, either. The place appeared to be deserted.

That made Gary curious. Gary didn’t like people, didn’t like being around them, but he was still a curious individual, and that often times got him into trouble—the inclination to learn and his inability to stand human contact. They were in direct opposition to each other and it took him years to fully understand that. If he was to remain calm then he had to temper his curiosity; he had to find other ways to learn the things he wanted, rather than venturing out into the world. Still, this was too much for Gary, the empty streets and the lack of trains floating through the air. It didn’t make any sense.

He had walked out into the hallway of his apartment complex and seen no one there either. That was the farthest he had walked out in a little over a year, but he heard people moving around outside his apartment from time to time. His curiosity piqued though and he couldn’t hold back. He walked through the hall and took the elevator down ten floors. He walked out into the lobby fully expecting a freak-out to happen. Applications would come though and they would protect him. They would keep the people from hurting him. He could always count on applications to do that, no matter how bad his freak-out was. But he had to know what was going on, why people weren’t moving around outside.

And yet, no one was in the lobby either. Not even the man who usually stood behind the guest counter. The place was completely empty.

So, Gary did what came extremely unnatural for him. He walked outside onto the street.

Looking around, he saw empty roads and stillness. The further he went out, the more he expected to find a huge crowd, all congregating around some exhibit and then his meltdown would come. It never came though, because Gary couldn’t find a single person anywhere.

The answers he needed weren’t outside. He turned around and followed his own steps back up to his apartment, still not seeing a soul the whole way up. He had work to do, but he could get that finished once he figured out what was going on here. The work was important, no doubt, and he enjoyed it, but this was…different. The world had changed in the past few days and he didn’t know how, didn’t have a clue as to why these streets weren’t moving like they usually did.

Gary turned on his scroll and started working through it, and sure enough, he found out what was happening.

The world, it appeared, had shut down.

People were dead, a lot of them—twelve—and The Genesis said it was from faulty wiring. They had all burnt up, died by fire. People were scared, scared to be around each other, scared to leave their apartments. Gary put the scroll down and walked to his window; he turned off the black screen covering it and looked out again.

Everyone knew what it felt like to be Gary Pierre now. They all were too scared to go anywhere, to do anything. They all sat inside their apartments, not even venturing out to work. The world had shut down. And, for once, Gary had free reign to leave as he wanted, because he wasn’t going to meet a single soul outside.

*

This is what you wanted? This is the plan?

We knew there would be…hardship, at first. We knew the first iteration would make waves. We always knew the probability was high.

Is that what this is? A wave? Every human on the entire planet is hiding inside their dwelling and won’t come out. It appears they’ve lost trust in what we tell them.

That’s fine. This isn’t about them. It’s about him, The Theory. He’s the only one we’re really concerned with.

Even so, how long can the world continue on like this? The applications can’t run everything; at some point, humans need to at least be a part of raising the crops. If we lose them, it sets us back decades.

And what is a decade to a millennium.

Silence draped across the entity for a while.

We have to name them. We have to tell humanity we know what happened, and that it won’t happen again. The citizenry can’t hide like this. They can’t be too scared to leave their homes. We will need them at some point, and if they’ve chosen a path of fear, we won’t be able to use them. We have to name the first iteration, name all of them, and then say—

*

The Genesis’ Release Statement

The Genesis is committed to complete eradication of these terrorists.

The original assessment of faulty wiring in the building was incorrect, made by an older application, which has since been upgraded. The truth, something that this terrorist group tried to hide out of fear of the sure retaliation that is coming, is that a group of individuals—small in number—killed the Population Control Council out of malice. Out of hate. The group that did this calls themselves The Named, although their title is unimportant. They are insane, completely outside the realm of Necessary. They are dangerous, but not in the way the planet seems to think. They are no threat to any of you, not in the slightest. They managed to kill a handful of people in a cowardly fashion, and they will not be able to do it again as The Genesis has placed extra precautions throughout its systems. Not a single member of this terrorist organization will be able to step inside a city anywhere on this planet.

The real danger with this group is allowing them to paralyze you. Allowing them to dictate whether or not you venture outside of your homes, whether you go to your job, whether you visit friends and family. Not a single application has been cowed by this group, nor will a single one be so cowed. In the same way, humanity must be bold. Humanity must not allow this group to think for them, must not allow this group to decide what will happen in everyday life. That is what they wish to do. To keep the world fearful. To make you think that anyone can die at any second when it simply isn’t true. This group, The Named, is trivial in its overall importance, and The Genesis will eradicate them within a few weeks.

Chapter Nine

“Why did Manny push so hard?” Caesar asked, his hand on the shirt he just placed into his bag.

“He’s scared,” Jerry said.

“Of what?” Caesar didn’t look over at his door where Jerry stood.

“Of you. Of losing me. Of us failing. He’s scared of what most people here are scared of. You’re new. You’re unproven. They look at you as taking me away, taking me to a city on a strange mission from which I might not return. They think I’m the important one out of us two, at least right now they do. That’ll change though, very soon. Manny and the others, they won’t be fearful anymore.”

Caesar reached into the dresser and grabbed another article of clothing. He folded it and placed it in his bag.

“And Paige?”

The old man didn’t talk for a second and Caesar waited. The tension that grew a few hours ago in the other room had become almost unbearable. Manny eventually left, just walked out on the discussion. The others stayed, but most of them avoided eye contact with Caesar. Most of them wanted what Manny wanted, wanted someone else to go with Caesar and for Jerry to stay with them. He was their leader, not Caesar.

“She believes, I think. Or at least, she’s starting to. Paige saw what you did all those months ago. She saw you lay your life out for two people that you barely knew.”

“Is she going to die?” Caesar asked, stopping his packing. They would leave this bunker, their home, within the hour and venture to a strange city a world away from here. Everything that could be planned already had been, now they only needed to execute. When Caesar was finished here, he would say goodbye to Leon, and then they would begin their journey. Caesar didn’t have anyone else to say goodbye too, especially not after that last meeting.

“She may. I don’t know yet. If we can’t get her skin to heal, we can’t hold off infection forever. Her body will eventually succumb.”

“And what then?”

“Then you join The Eight.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” Caesar turned around and looked at Jerry for the first time since the old man opened his door. “How many years has she served with you?”

“Ten.”

“And if she dies, you move on?”

“You don’t know what a thousand years means, Caesar. You can’t possibly know. Everyone I’ve ever met has died. I don’t want Paige to die, but if she does, this still continues. The Named is going to finish what those two people started hundreds of years ago. I’ll feel sadness, but this is bigger than Paige and she knows it. That’s why she went out into the world to find you; she knew she might die. She was okay with that. Everyone at that table is okay with dying, and for the most part, they’re okay with the rest of us dying too.”

“Except for you,” Caesar said. “They’re not okay with you dying.”

“They don’t think they are, but that’s because they haven’t really seen you yet. Paige has, or at least part of you, and she’s okay with my death. That’s what she said in there. The same thing I just said. That if I die, you join The Eight and The Named continues moving forward.”

Caesar turned around and put the last piece of clothing into his bag. He really didn’t know how much he would need. Jerry had one bag slung over his shoulder. He wore his sunglasses, hiding the part of his face that The Genesis destroyed a thousand years ago. Hiding it because the places they were going wouldn’t accept it, would turn them in immediately. Hiding it because Jerry wasn’t able to be himself.

“Caesar, I want to talk to you about something before we leave,” Jerry said.

Caesar looked up from his bag.

“Do you feel like someone should pay for what was done to your parents? Or do you feel like what happened to them should be left alone, that there’s nothing to be done?”

Caesar studied Jerry’s face; why was he asking this right now? They had spoken of his parents before, but not like this, not in terms of vengeance.

“I mean, that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Someone’s going to pay. The Genesis,” he answered.

“And what about the others, the people that stand in your way of getting to The Genesis, of making it pay? How do you plan on getting by them?”

Caesar had thought about this before, but only briefly. Whenever it came up, he pushed the thought away, not wanting to confront what Jerry was asking him now. He would kill The Genesis—he knew that—but what would he do to someone else protecting it?

“I don’t know,” he said, looking down at the floor. “The Genesis owes a debt, but no one else.”

“You might be right, but you might be wrong, too. The ends justify the means, Caesar. I truly believe that. What you’re after, what this whole thing is about, it’s bigger than any one person. Bigger than you, bigger than me, bigger than all of us. You have your own reasons for this, and I have mine, but if either of us are going to achieve what we want, then you need to realize the truth in that statement: the ends justify the means.”

Caesar had heard the statement before. It sounded, to him, like something The Genesis would believe in wholeheartedly. But did he? Did the ends justify the means for his parents? If The Named succeeded and somehow managed to bring down The Genesis, was their death okay then? Was it worth it?

“Look, I’m not saying it’s definite,” Jerry said. “I just want you to think about it. If it’s your life or someone else’s, you need to know what you’re going to do. You don’t want to be in a position where you might die and not know how to react.”

Caesar had helped in killing the council over Population Control, but that was different than what Jerry was saying now. Jerry was saying that there was a good chance he would have to kill someone, face to face, if he wanted to succeed. No planning, no timed explosions, no help. Just him and murder.

Caesar heard the footsteps moving down the hall, taking him away from his thoughts.

“Hey,” someone else said from the door.

It was Paige, her head peeking around the corner. Jerry and he both looked at her.

“Hey,” Caesar said, his hand on the zipper to finish the job of packing.

“I just wanted to tell you guys bye. Good luck. All of that.”

Jerry turned and opened his arms, which Paige moved into, wrapping her own arms around Jerry. Caesar watched Jerry carefully place his arms, not touching Paige’s back.

When they released, Paige looked back over at Caesar.

“Thanks,” he said. He didn’t want to say goodbye, because that seemed so final, especially after what Jerry just said. “We’ll be back.”

She looked at him, her eyes asking the same question they had previously. A question that he still couldn’t decipher.

“I know,” she said after a few seconds. She looked to Jerry. “Take care of him.”

Then Paige turned and left the room with Caesar staring after her.

Chapter Ten

“Quickly,” Jerry said, stepping past Caesar.

He watched the old man move, a speed in him now that he hadn’t shown in all the months past. A quickness that said if they dallied here, they wouldn’t make it. That what came now was crucial to making sure anything came next.

Jerry stepped onto the train and Caesar followed, trying to match his steps to the thousand-year-old man, trying to keep up.

The past few days were little more than a blur. They left the bunker and traveled at first using a vehicle that must have been made shortly after The Singularity—still using gasoline instead of solar rays. They used it until they ran out of desert, and then on foot, traveled into a wooded area that Caesar didn’t know, nor really understand. Inside there, hidden, a plane waited—they landed it twenty miles out from the city. From there, they walked at a nearly back-breaking pace. They walked the entire twenty miles in a single night, with very little rest. Jerry didn’t seem to need it. No accumulation of steps seemed to wear on him in the slightest. Caesar was nearly delirious as they stepped onto the train, the first train they had encountered at the edge of the city.

He barely remembered Jerry opening up Caesar’s eyes and placing in lenses.

“They’ll keep the systems from optically registering you.”

Other precautions too, but those slipped his mind as easily as water through a strainer. So many miles. Blisters the size of rocks canvassed his feet, and Jerry had to apply salve just to keep him walking.

Quickly.

The word felt like a slap across Caesar’s face, the urgency in Jerry’s voice not something he had heard before. It woke him up, if only slightly, making him realize that all the previous travel, that all the miles behind him mattered little if he didn’t do something now. But he didn’t know what. He didn’t know where they were, really, or what the plan was. He followed Jerry, had followed Jerry the entire way, but Jerry didn’t tell him what he needed to do.

Quickly.

Caesar stood on the train looking around, his eyes taking in blurred images as his eyelids started trying to close again, the exhaustion reclaiming him.

The train looked empty, but that made sense, or at least he thought it did—who knew what sense actually was—because they were on the edge of a city. No one came out here because there wasn’t any reason to, outside of venturing into the wilderness for a day’s excursion. This train…it had to come once a week, if that. The car they stood on was completely empty though, and dear Genesis, if he could just take a seat.

He moved to a chair on his left, not looking at Jerry, not knowing what else was going on around him, just wanting to rest.

He sat.

And as the thing materialized around him, he barely understood it. His brain tried to rev up, to figure out what was happening, but it was like a dream, everything moving around him in ways that he didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

The thing came from under him, taking form right out of the air.

It wasn’t human.

It was static, the look of snow on a television screen, something ephemeral yet very, very permanent. It didn’t take a primate form, didn’t grow legs and arms, didn’t form a head. Instead, the static began wrapping around Caesar, tentacles of bright electricity wrapping around his neck, his face, latching onto his eyes like a squid’s tentacles wrapped around food. Taking him in, eating him alive.

And finally his brain clicked into place, snapping to the present like a whip popping in the air. He was going to die. Right here with this disgusting, alien presence taking him whole, all at once. The static, the snow, the goddamn air latched onto him like steel melting with other steel, forming a grip that he couldn’t break free from. And cold, oh so fucking cold. He tried to stretch outward, tried to stand up and brake free, but he couldn’t move. The thing had him locked down, and the cold was sinking into his bones, into his brain, slowing him down.

His vision was turning into little more than a blizzard, but he could still see Jerry, barely.

Not for long though.

Caesar was dead, and he knew it. Knew it well.

And then the blizzard disappeared. His vision cleared; he watched as Jerry moved.

The speed was almost incomprehensible. Jerry’s hands grabbed the static cloud trying to replace Caesar’s own flesh and pulled with such force that Caesar felt certain his own skin would rip off. He watched as electricity rippled across Jerry’s body, literal lightning currents rolling up his arms and under the shirt he wore. His body flexed underneath the currents, tensing up, but he didn’t stop pulling. His teeth gritted and the flesh on his mouth rippled as the currents moved further upward.

With a final tug, the cold blanket was off Caesar, leaving him sitting there staring stupidly as Jerry struggled with the entity. The ghost that took no shape. It continued its electrocution but now turned the force it had used against Caesar on Jerry, wrapping around him, embracing Jerry’s pulling, slipping around him like a glove.

Jerry stopped struggling, letting the electricity flow over him as well as the cloud.

“NO!” Caesar shouted, watching as Jerry stood paralyzed, the thing covering him, moving underneath his shirt and pants so that it wrapped around his skin. Caesar stood, but could do nothing. The static cloud ate Jerry’s entire body.

Fingers wrapped in off-white flexed into a fist and Jerry’s head—although none of his actual flesh or hair was visible—titled towards the ceiling.

Currents rose off his body, now rippling outward from the white cloud that surrounded him. That had become him. Both electrocuting him and smothering him. Smothering the man that had just walked Caesar from a desert to a city, from the life of a sheep to the life of a wolf. Ending right before his eyes, right here on this train before they ever even had a chance.

Caesar thought it was electricity at first, his eyes telling him that he saw the currents rolling out into the air, perhaps trying to find him, perhaps trying to kill him next. Except it wasn’t. The cloud, the static, was dissipating, drifting out into the air like seeds on a dandelion. The electricity still rolled across Jerry’s body, but lessening, turning into sparks rather than currents. Caesar watched as Jerry’s flesh appeared again, old and cracked, but a million times better than the digital snow.

Within a few seconds only Jerry remained. The entity which had wrapped around him gone.

Caesar collapsed on the seat.

He remembered looking at Jerry, watching him as he fell to one knee, his body shaking, barely able to hold himself up. And then Caesar saw only blackness.

*

Caesar didn’t even know what had to happen. He didn’t have a clue.

Manny knew. Manny knew well what was expected of Caesar and it was that reason, perhaps more than any other, that Manny wasn’t in Caesar’s place right now. That Manny was here at the bunker while Caesar traveled with Jerry.

Jerry had asked Manny, asked him right up front if it was something he thought he could do. If it was something he would do, because if he didn’t, then he couldn’t lead. He wouldn’t be able to do what was needed because he wouldn’t have the capabilities.

Manny told him no, and now he sat in front of his wife, their child in a highchair sipping on juice, instead of with the man who had brought him into The Named, had made him part of The Eight.

“He’ll be okay, right?” Brandi asked. She hadn’t asked about Jerry before this. Manny spent the last week in a world full of anger, perhaps even depression, which he hadn’t experienced before. This was the first time he had even sat with her, the first time he came out of the room he hid in, really. She hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t tried to barge in, and Manny was grateful for that. Although, he didn’t think she understood the complete reasons behind it all. Not from this question. She thought he was worried for Jerry, and he was, but that was only a part of the whole thing.

“I don’t know,” he said. He reached over and poked Dustin gently in his cheek, the child smiling at his father’s attention.

“He’s so young, you know? I can’t believe Jerry is taking him out there this soon.”

Manny turned his head and looked at his wife, slowly, like he wasn’t exactly sure what was before him.

“What?” He asked.

“Caesar. He’s not even thirty-five. Taking him back into a city, basically naked? It just seems like a huge risk, especially if Caesar is what Jerry says he is.”

She didn’t have a clue. Not a fucking clue as to what was going on in his head. She was worried about Caesar, about the guy brought in from the outside to save everyone, the entire world. Not their true leader. Not Manny’s mentor. Everyone’s mentor.

“Not concerned about Jerry?” Manny asked, trying to hide the disgust he felt. He wouldn’t disrespect his wife, wouldn’t show the anger he felt inside.

“Jerry? He’ll be fine. Nothing’s going to happen to him. Caesar, though, he’s…just so green. Isn’t that what was wrong with you? With all of you? Most of The Eight have been gone for the past couple days, scared, I guess. You’re all worried about Caesar, right?”

The others did the same? Went and hid from the world?

“Wait, the rest of The Eight haven’t been in touch with anyone?”

“Paige and one or two others. I think maybe Tim. For the most part, they kind of all disappeared, though.”

Manny looked back at his son, a bit surprised. He knew he was angry at the whole thing but he hadn’t known anyone else felt the same. “No, I’m not worried about Caesar, Brandi. I’m worried about Jerry.”

His wife didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Why?”

“Because I think he’s risking his life for a fraud. Caesar isn’t the one we’ve been looking for and Jerry doesn’t see it. He’s going to get himself killed for someone who doesn’t deserve it, and we’re all going to be sitting here wondering what to do next, where to go, and none of us will be able to do it without Jerry.”

Manny stood up from the table. He’d come out because he couldn’t sit in that room forever, because he needed to be a father and a husband and the world didn’t stop simply because Jerry left with Caesar. The anger though, these thoughts, they hadn’t lessened. If anything, they’d grown, now to the point that he was saying them aloud to his wife. He loved Brandi, but she wasn’t his confidant. Jerry was. He took thoughts like these directly to Jerry and made his case to their leader, not to his wife. Jerry wasn’t listening any longer though. Jerry had made up his mind and there wasn’t any turning him from it. So now Manny did what? Turned to his wife? Voiced these feelings to someone that couldn’t do a thing about them?

There was hope though, some at least.

Manny knew what Caesar had to commit to even though Caesar didn’t. Jerry hadn’t told him. Jerry would show him, that’s the way he wanted to do it, hoping that in showing him what was necessary Caesar would make the decision that Manny hadn’t been able to. If Caesar couldn’t make that decision either, then it was all over. Someone else would be chosen and Jerry’s delusion of this one guy, this one person being their savior, would fade. Someone would save them, but it wouldn’t be Caesar.

Chapter Eleven

Caesar woke.

The room before him was only that, a room, nothing else. No furniture, a single light above, and concrete beneath him.

He rolled over, feeling the hardness underneath him for the first time, understanding that he didn’t even have a shirt to rest his head on.

Where’s Jerry? His mind flipped on the same as a light-switch, suddenly roaring and ready to go, remembering what happened on the train, remembering just before the blackness that Jerry had nearly collapsed.

He sat up, his body sore but not slowing down.

Jerry sat in a corner, his knees bent and his arms at his side.

“You’ve been asleep for a few hours. We’re safe here.”

Caesar blinked. Jerry looked different. Nothing that someone who didn’t know him could point out, but different still. Older, if that was even possible. Aged, like a building that weathers the climate for centuries.

“Are you okay?” He asked. Jerry had done something, had pulled that thing off him and put it on himself, and then…killed it? Is that what he did? Was the thing even alive to be killed?

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“What happened? You look different, Jerry. You look, I don’t know, not hurt, but…tired,” Caesar said, standing up, his legs aching.

“I guess I am. That thing, I should have seen it, but I didn’t. It was waiting on us. I don’t know if The Genesis put it there or if they’re simply having those things ride trains now hoping to find us, but it was waiting. If The Genesis put it there, we’re in trouble, Caesar. I won’t sit here and tell you any differently. That means it knows where we’re headed. It would know why we’re here and things a lot worse than that will be waiting.”

“The hell was it?”

Jerry brought his hands to his knees and used his right to pick at his left, absently, like he didn’t know he was even doing it. His dry skin flaked off into the air. “The Genesis calls it a blanket. It’s an application, one of the many humans don’t know about. The Genesis used it a long time ago for exactly what you just saw. It lays in wait, for certain persons programmed inside it. It actually picks up your scent, basically, able to register the air you breathe out of your lungs, able to pinpoint you. I think it has something like a mile radius. It moves through the air like any other application, but when it finds you, it envelops you and in the end, would have picked you up like a piece of furniture and carried you to wherever The Genesis wanted you. They used it for dignitaries and things like that during the original purge. Most have probably been decommissioned, although The Genesis might be creating more now. I would, if I was it.”

Caesar listened, taking in the words, almost unable to believe it. “It was waiting on us? Does that mean The Genesis knows we’re here now? Did it communicate back?”

“I don’t think so. It was an old model. It was focused only on us, and planned on communicating back as soon as we were secured. The thing was as old as me, Caesar. A newer model would have connected instantaneously.”

“What did you do to it? What did it do to you?” He walked across the room toward Jerry’s corner.

Jerry tapped on his temple. “The chip. For a brief period all those years ago, I reversed it and was able to travel along The Genesis’ neural pathways. I know a lot because I had access to a lot of information. That thing, the blanket, it’s pure electricity. When it gripped onto me, I basically brought it inside of me because of the metal on my body. I broke it apart, separating the electrons from each other. It couldn’t hold together any longer once it sunk in. Like lightning striking the ground.”

“It took a toll?” Caesar asked. He didn’t need an answer. He saw what Jerry paid, like a fucking price tag hanging off him.

“Yeah. That much electricity flowing through anyone will take a toll. Take what you want, just pay for it, I guess,” he said.

Caesar looked down at the ground. “What’s next?”

“You saw what I did on the train?”

Caesar nodded, not looking up.

“What would have happened if I wasn’t there?”

He tilted his head so that his eyes saw Jerry again. “I would have died.”

“Yeah. You would have. I might not always be here, Caesar. Even that, at this stage in my life, has weakened me. I won’t be here forever.”

Caesar didn’t say anything, knowing the old man would continue.

“What I am, this body, this metal mixed with flesh, if you want to win this, you’ll have to become it. You’ll have to graft your body to a metal frame. It’s not just for things like the blanket, but for others that you’re going to come up against. Applications that take physical form are stronger and faster than humans. You won’t be able to stop them in your current body and I might not be able to save you next time. If you die, Caesar, this is over. No one at the bunker has the ability to do what I’m asking, none of them will create the body that is needed.”

Caesar looked over the old man, his eyes looking at the frail arms and the dry skin. The gray hair. Had he not seen what happened on the train—the way he pulled that thing from him when Caesar couldn’t move an inch, and the way he allowed it to flow through his body without killing him—he wouldn’t believe a thing Jerry said. The man looked, simply, old. Not powerful. Not capable of destroying anything.

“Why won’t they create it? Why won’t Manny?”

“Because once you start, you lose control of the process. The first piece is putting a chip in your head like mine and then infusing your skeleton with bits of metal. The way it’s done changes your actual genetic makeup. Your body will prefer the metal, prefer the machinery, because it sees it as more sustainable. Which it is. You’ll stop creating flesh, Caesar. Your body will turn itself into a machine. After a thousand years, I might be five percent human. By doing this, you won’t die of natural causes, at least not until long after everyone you’ve ever met has died. It’s too much for a lot of people to handle, becoming this.”

His hands opened up, as if showcasing his body.

“We probably won’t live that long anyway, Jerry. The Genesis will probably kill us before I ever have to worry about living forever, right?”

*

“What are they going to do to the guy when they find him?” Leon asked.

Paige stood at the sink, washing her dishes. The rag was warm against her skin and the water almost hot as it poured from the faucet. She held a pot in her left hand and the rag in her right, but she stopped scrubbing when he asked the question.

“Try to get the information out of him, I guess,” she said.

She didn’t turn around but listened as Leon pulled a chair up to the table behind her, the one she had just eaten at.

“And if the guy won’t give it to him, then what?”

What was he in here asking her for? Leon Bastille was what Paige called a forced guest. He couldn’t leave but was only allowed to stay because of everyone’s grace, of Jerry’s grace. Why did he think she had the answers to these things? She wasn’t the one out there with them, she hadn’t been chosen as the one that would lead them through The Genesis. She was a member of The Eight, and at this point, that meant she listened to Jerry.

Calm down, she thought.

He wasn’t asking anything unreasonable, and logically, she knew that. She didn’t like Leon Bastille because his actions killed that little girl. Killed Laura. Because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and his bitch wife ended up getting a lot of people murdered. That’s where this came from, not from him asking a simple question.

Jerry allowed him to stay. Caesar allowed him to live. That’s enough.

“I imagine they’ll make him. I’m not sure they have much of a choice,” she said.

“By hurting him?”

She started scrubbing the pot again. “Yeah, that’s what I would do.”

“Would you?”

Paige turned around. “Yeah. I would.” The two stared at each other for a second before Leon dropped his eyes to the table, his finger picking at some invisible spot on the wood.

“Talk to me about Caesar,” he said after a few seconds.

She laughed, her hands stopping their work again. Talk to him about Caesar? The balls on this guy were so large they probably had a gravitational pull. The dumbest person in the entire compound, by a long shot, but he didn’t seem to get it or didn’t seem to care. He never seemed to care, and part of that was endearing, she couldn’t deny it. Brave or stupid, he went on with his life as if he belonged here.

“About what?”

“Did you really just turn off those feelings you had for him?”

She looked down at the suds in the sink. “I was acting. I was doing what I had to do to bring him back to us.”

“But you slept with him right?”

She nodded.

“And there was nothing to it? No feelings, it was just an act? Like a—“

Paige smiled in spite of what the man was saying. “Don’t you dare call me a prostitute,” she finished for him.

“Well, there was nothing between you guys though?”

She dropped the pot and rag into the sink and turned around to face him again. He didn’t look away this time. “I care about Jerry. I love Jerry. I care about The Eight. I love them. I love the people that live here. What I did when I went to the city was for them. Not for Caesar. I needed to know him better. I needed to know what he would do. I don’t hate Caesar, but am I in love with him? No.”

Are you lying, little girl? A piece of her mind asked, but she ignored it.

Leon smiled, surprisingly. “I’m in love with him, I suppose. I don’t have anyone else to love, so why not make it him?”

They both continued looking at each other.

“Do you think Jerry is right?” He asked.

He was dumb, but firing on all cylinders right now. Asking questions that Paige didn’t want to answer and yet questions that her subconscious wrestled with. Was Jerry right? Or was he a fool? That’s what The Eight couldn’t decide, or rather The Seven. Some believed and some didn’t, and where did she fall? Honestly. Not what Jerry said and not what she brought back from the city in the form of feelings for Caesar. What did she really think? Were they hitching their cart to a horse that would fail long before it finished its travels? She told Jerry and Caesar to go, that she thought they would be fine, that they should be the ones to do this. She said it because…

Because why?

“I don’t know,” she answered. She moved away from the sink, wiping her wet hands on her jeans, and sat at the table next to Leon. “Why are you asking?”

“Because I don’t know if I believe Jerry. Caesar doesn’t either.”

There weren’t any lies in this man. He was open, sitting at the table, and trying to be honest with her. Trying to figure out his own feelings about this whole thing he had half thrust himself into and been half dragged into.

“I want him to be,” Paige said.

“Why?”

“Because we’ve waited so long. Because those before us waited so long. Because Jerry believes so strongly. I want this to end, Leon. I want The Genesis to fall and I want humanity to have some say in what happens to it.”

Leon laughed and Paige leaned back against the chair, surprised.

“So you don’t buy what The Genesis says?” He asked. “You think humanity alone should decide what happens to the entire world??”

“To have The Genesis’ viewpoint, you have to think humanity is evil. You have to think that our core is designed to destroy what we touch. I don’t believe that. I believe that at our core, we create.”

“What if you’re wrong, though?” Leon asked.

“So what if I am? Don’t we get to decide that, what happens to us? Not a police force, not a God, but us?”

Leon nodded. “I’d never heard anything like this until Caesar started talking crazy, now there’s a whole compound full of people talking like this. I still don’t buy it, though. I still think The Genesis has it right. If we can’t moderate ourselves, then something else has to.”

Paige tilted her head, looking at Caesar’s friend. That thought was deeper than most of what the rest could or would think in the cities. She disagreed with it, indeed, would kill for her disbelief in what he said, but at least he had logic behind it. At least he wasn’t a complete sheep.

“And Caesar?” She asked.

“Him? Oh he’s on board with you guys about all that. Lost his goddamn mind, if you ask me.”

“That happens when your family’s murdered, I suppose,” Paige said.

“You want Jerry to be right, though?” The voice came from the entrance to the kitchen. Paige and Leon both looked, finding Manny standing in the doorway. How long had he been there? How long had he heard their conversation?

“Don’t you?” Paige asked in return.

“I want him to be, of course, but he’s not.”

“And how do you know that?” Leon asked before Paige could say anything else. But not just asking, challenging, his voice taking on a hardness that it hadn’t the entire time he spoke with her.

“What’s he done to show that he is?” Manny asked, not walking inside the kitchen, but remaining in the doorway.

“I don’t know,” Leon said. “I don’t know what any of you have done to be considered anything important anywhere, but apparently you all consider yourselves the saviors of humanity. So from my point of view, he’s done exactly what you have. Maybe more, because he actually put his life on the line. Have you?”

Manny smiled. “Not yet,” he said.

He turned and walked out of the kitchen.

Chapter Twelve

Gary Pierre walked along the streets again.

He was discovering that he liked being outside. That as long as the streets weren’t covered with other people, he enjoyed the weather, the sun, the breeze, the feel of concrete beneath his shoes. He enjoyed it all. He took a lot of walks now, the city still trying to hide from some invisible monster. Everyone had read The Genesis’ announcement, but The Genesis still hadn’t executed those people it called The Named, so the citizenry stayed inside.

Most people, anyway. The streets were becoming busier, and that was a bummer, for sure. It caused Gary to walk to one side of the street or other, depending on who was in front of him. He still walked, hadn’t given it up yet, but he certainly wasn’t going to be walking next to someone else. He would have to give it up soon, he knew that. Eventually people would wise up and believe The Genesis, eventually they would come back outside. The trains would run on full schedules again and the streets would buzz with the busyness of a beehive. For now, though, he could enjoy it. He could take his two-hour long walks and still go back home in time to finish his work.

Why, oh, why couldn’t The Named keep blowing things up? Why couldn’t people remain just as terrified as he was, because when they found their terror, he was able to let his go.

He looked in front of him, down the street a ways, and saw a man coming towards him. Great, he’d have to cross. He had time though.

Gary kept walking, his eyes moving from the concrete to the man on the street, checking his distance, making sure he had enough time to cross the street so that he wouldn’t get unnecessarily close to the man. Gary forgot all about the day, forgot all about the world around him. All he could focus on was walking and where in relation to his walk the man up the street was.

And with twenty feet left, Gary decided enough was enough. He looked at both sides of the road, although it was only out of habit because very few trains barreled along anymore. He’d make it across and not see a single one.

He stepped out onto the street and crossed.

Or rather, tried to cross, because as soon as he looked up, he saw someone standing there, on the other side of the street. This person wasn’t walking; he stared right at Gary. Their eyes even met.

A chill moved from the crown of Gary’s head down his spine. The man wasn’t looking away. He wasn’t making eye contact mistakenly. He was staring, looking directly at Gary.

Gary looked back to the other side of the road, but the man that had been walking towards him was stopped now too. Looking at Gary. Both of them looking at him as if he was food of some kind.

His bladder let go, leaking down his leg. Conscious thought stopped and Gary started to run. He didn’t scream, just ran, his lungs heaving in and out to try and move his unaccustomed body at the speed he wanted. The man on his left started running too—and NONONONONO—Gary had never seen someone move that fast. Gary took three large leaps before the man was on him, covering fifty feet in seconds, and as the fear grew to a level Gary never knew before, the man brought his hand down across the bridge of Gary’s nose, and all the fear stopped.

Blessed be that hand, because all the fear stopped.

*

Gary Pierre lay in a heap on the same concrete floor that Caesar had woken up on a few hours before.

Caesar stared at him, waiting on Jerry to return. They had to restrain Pierre and they needed supplies for that, so Jerry left just after dropping him off.

“What if he wakes up?”

“Hold this under his nose,” Jerry had said.

The small packet rested in Caesar’s hand while he stood above the man. The autistic. Caesar had never met someone like this before, only read about them in books. Jerry seemed to understand what would happen and that’s why, after watching Pierre for a couple of days, they approached on opposite sides of the road. Still, the response was surprising. The man pissed himself as he fled. He didn’t look like he was in control of anything, like panic ruled him completely.

And then, Jerry had moved, and Caesar felt a bit of that panic inside him as well. No one could move like that; Caesar barely believed that he actually saw Jerry making the path he did. That speed, that power, and yet the ability to stop so quickly and gracefully, each motion perfectly controlled. He cracked Gary’s nose and blood gushed out onto the road, but with that much speed behind him, he should have crashed into the autistic and broke his entire body, not just one bone with his hand.

That’s what Jerry was talking about.

That Caesar had to become that. He had to be able to move like that. He had to travel as fast and powerful as one of the trains.

He had to change his genetic make-up. He had to become a machine.

Caesar said they would most likely die before he ever had a chance to grow old. But what if he didn’t? What if they won this and he lived forever, watching everyone he knew die? Watching people he loved die, year in and year out, while he kept on going? Watching the consequences of his actions, the actions that he took here today, so that he could live out the truth of whether The Genesis should survive? He knew what he believed, but what if he was wrong? With Jerry’s body, he’d have to see how wrong he could be. He might have to witness the destruction of the world.

That’s propaganda. That’s years of The Genesis telling you if humanity thrives then the world must die. It isn’t true.

Three quick raps came from the door, scattering Caesar’s thoughts.

“Jerry?”

“Yeah.”

He walked over and opened the door. Jerry carried a chair in one hand, a flimsy thing, and digital tape in the other.

“Give me just a second,” he said.

Caesar watched as the man who looked ancient, who shouldn’t be able to hurt anyone without seriously injuring himself, quickly scooped up the person lying on the floor and sat him in the chair, and then with an efficiency that only The Genesis could have created, strapped the digital tape onto the man. Four pieces, one covering each limb and attaching it to the chair.

He turned around and looked at Caesar.

“Are you ready?”

“No,” Caesar said.

Jerry laughed. “Well, it’s probably time to get ready.”

Caesar threw his hands in the air. “I don’t know what the fuck to do here? We’re going to wake him up and what? Ask him some questions?”

*

The saying was that the ends justified the means.

Jerry needed the means to justify the end here. He didn’t know how it was going to work yet, but this was the time. Something needed to arise for that ruthlessness to show itself. Jerry believed it was here, but he had to see it, and this was the time.

The autistic was sweating awful. Big, full drops of water beaded on his forehead before falling down his face and onto his soaked shirt. Tears streamed from his eyes in a constant stream, mixing in with the sweat as they both traveled the same paths down his skin.

Caesar stood in front of him. This had been going on for twenty minutes maybe, perhaps longer. The autistic crying and Caesar screaming at him. Even that was shocking, more than Jerry had ever seen from Caesar.

Inches from Pierre’s face. Screaming at him. Spit flying from Caesar’s mouth onto Pierre’s face, where he shuttered each time the drops landed.

“TELL ME WHERE IT IS!”

“THE TOURIST. WHERE’S IT HIDDEN?!”

And so on and so on it went, with Pierre growing more terrified with every word.

Caesar stepped back and looked over to Jerry. He was sweating too, his chest heaving up and down from his own exertions. Caesar didn’t say anything to Jerry, just looked, his eyes speaking instead of his mouth. He didn’t know how to continue, didn’t know what to do to get this man—this person who could barely handle human contact in any form—to talk.

That was fine. Exasperation was fine. They would find out where The Tourist lived if Jerry had to cut it from the man’s brain. That’s not what Jerry wanted to see here.

Caesar looked away and went to the wall. He grabbed the only other chair in the room and sat it down in front of Pierre.

“I want you to leave, Gary. I want you to get out of here safe and sound and get back to your apartment. I mean that.” He looked down at his feet. The autistic had pinned himself back against his chair, trying to stay away from Caesar, trying not to touch him or be touched by him. “I can’t let you go, though, unless you tell me. You understand that? I need to know that one thing, where The Tourist resides, and then you can go. No more screaming. No more me spitting on you or standing over you. You walk out that door over there and you never see me again.”

The autistic’s eyes were almost closed, squinting so hard like if he could just block out the people in front of him then maybe they wouldn’t really exist.

“Tell me, Gary, and you get to go home. Tell me and all of this can end.”

Caesar didn’t know he was lying to the man. He believed that when this was all over, Pierre would go home while Caesar and Jerry went on their merry way. Jerry looked on, understanding that wasn’t a possibility. Understanding that one way or the other, Pierre wasn’t making it out of here alive. He couldn’t. The moment he left this room, he’d scream at the top of his lungs until an application showed up and listened to him. Then it wouldn’t matter if Caesar and Jerry understood where The Tourist was at, because The Genesis would know they were looking for it. No, Pierre wouldn’t leave this room alive.

The ends justified the means, and Jerry had to figure out what end would justify this man’s murder. Because Caesar had to commit it or Caesar would end up dead here next to Pierre. If Caesar couldn’t do it, then all of this ended. If Caesar couldn’t kill, then none of it would work, none of it could go forward. Caesar would die and Jerry would leave The Named, because there wasn’t any sense pretending that they had a chance. There wasn’t any sense in any of this, if Caesar couldn’t do what was necessary.

Jerry watched as the autistic pressed his lips together, his face scrunching together like crumpled paper. “Junisper,” he whispered. “Junisper. Junisper. Junisper.” The words left his mouth almost as softly as wind on an open field. Over and over he said them, repeating them like they were a ward to keep Caesar from screaming at him, from touching him, from getting close to him at all.

Caesar looked up at Jerry, his face haggard, his eyes red.

“Is that what we need? Does it make sense?”

It did. Jerry knew the city. Across the globe but he knew it. The Tourist lived in Junisper.

Jerry nodded. “Yes.”

Caesar let out a relieved sigh. “Thank God.” He smiled looking up at Gary. “See, that wasn’t so hard. You get to go home now.”

Caesar stood from his chair and walked away from Pierre, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck.

“Havetotellhavetotellhavetotell,” the words spilled from Pierre’s mouth like oil from a pressurized well, an unstoppable stream.

Jerry tilted his head slightly to the right as he looked at the autistic, understanding what he was saying over and over. Have to tell. Have to tell. Pierre realized what he had done, realized what he had just told the two men and now realized that he had to alert someone.

Oh, blessed be the meek—could Jerry have asked for anything better? The ends justified the means, and if this wasn’t the most perfect way to show it, then none existed.

Caesar turned around from the wall. “What’s he talking about?”

Pierre still hadn’t ceased repeating the phrase over and over.

“He’s going to tell The Genesis what just happened,” Jerry said, looking at the autistic instead of Caesar. “He’s going to tell what he just told us and it won’t matter in the slightest what we just found out, because when arrive at The Tourist, The Genesis will be waiting.”

Caesar turned and looked at the man, his eyes closed, sweat still coming down like rain, and his mouth whispering the same words over and over.

“What do we do?” Caesar asked.

“We can’t let him leave.”

Caesar quickly looked back to Jerry. “You’re fucking kidding me. After what I just told him? You’re saying…what? What are you saying, Jerry?”

“If we leave and he’s alive, we’re signing our own death warrants. That’s what I’m saying.”

“So, what?” Caesar asked. “We kill him? Because he might tell on us?”

“There’s no other choice. He’s sitting there telling you what he’s going to do. Your parents’ death? Doesn’t matter. Everyone at the compound dies. We die. Everything ends.” Jerry didn’t look up from Pierre. The time of truth had arrived. Who had he chosen? Caesar would determine that now.

“Here,” Jerry said, pulling a small weapon from his pocket. He held it in the air toward Caesar. “It’ll be quick. Painless for him.”

“What is it?” Caesar asked, his voice almost as hushed as Pierre’s.

“You put it to his head and you pull the trigger. It has none of the violence one of those old guns had. A momentary shock inside his head and then everything ends for him.”

Caesar shook his head. “I can’t do it.”

“I told you that this ends when The Genesis is dead or we are. What you’re saying now is that we’re going to die, and you’re okay with that?” Jerry looked at Caesar, finally.

The autistic kept his incessant whispering going.

“I can’t kill him, Jerry. I just told him he was going home. I just told him that if he gave me what I wanted, I’d let him go home.”

“And now he’s telling you that when he gets home, he’s going to report you. When he gets home, everything that we’ve worked for ends, that’s what he’s telling you right now. Your parents, their death, that little girl, maybe even Paige. They all die and for nothing.”

Jerry saw fear living in Caesar’s eyes, bright and big. Fear of murder. Fear for Pierre. Perhaps fear for his own soul.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

Jerry still held the weapon out to him. He didn’t pocket it. Didn’t put it down. He still held onto his faith. He hadn’t picked the wrong person. He just needed prodding. Needed a gentle push.

“Your parents didn’t want to die either, Caesar. I didn’t want a chip inside my head and a body that refused to die. The Genesis did all of that, though. The Genesis shoved it on us. And now this one man is going to make sure that it can continue to shove whatever it wants on whoever it wants. If you walk out of here and that man in that chair is still living, you’re guaranteeing that an endless number of parents—just like yours—are melted down like old toys. You can stop it, though. Right now. The ends here are far greater than the means, Caesar. The ends are a world where parents aren’t killed because of a computer’s whim.”

Caesar looked down at the weapon, breaking his eye contact with Jerry. Ten seconds passed with Pierre still going on and on about needing to tell someone. Ten seconds passed, the future of the world weighed on Jerry as they did. Caesar’s choice here, with this one man, would decide the world.

He raised a shaky hand to Jerry’s and took the weapon into his own. He held his hand there for a few seconds, looking at the deadly machinery.

“In the end, it’s worth it,” Jerry said.

Caesar looked to the autistic and Jerry followed his glance. Pierre’s eyes were closed and his lips still moved.

Caesar stepped forward, slowly, the weapon at his side and his hand shaking like he had Parkinson’s.

He raised the piece to Pierre’s head, holding it there for a few seconds, and then he pulled down on the trigger.

Chapter Thirteen

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

The only hope left for this whole enterprise is Jerry, I suppose. Well, not Jerry anymore, per se, but Jerry’s plan. I have to give that to him, it was genius. Almost on par with The Genesis. Almost. Indeed, if anything saves Caesar now, it’s Jerry’s plan. I didn’t know, not when it happened, none of us did. No one knew what Jerry really wanted when he went out there to that man, to Gary Pierre. We thought it was to retrieve information.

But that was only part of it.

The other part was to retrieve Caesar.

Or create Caesar.

I never thought he could do it; I never thought Caesar could kill someone. All those years we were friends, the thought never crossed my mind, and yet he went out there with Jerry and committed murder. That’s what Jerry wanted though. He wanted someone capable of killing at close range. I don’t know the truth about Caesar’s parents’ death. I know what Jerry told us and I know what The Eight believed. That it was all a mistake and that Caesar was supposed to be extracted before The Genesis could get ahold of him. But at the same time, I look at what Caesar did in that room, I think about what that blood must have felt like as it hit his own skin, warm and fresh, and I wonder if Jerry set it all up from the beginning. I wonder if Caesar’s parents died because Jerry needed Caesar to lose his heart, to lose his soul. I wonder if Jerry killed Caesar’s parents, not with his own hand, but with a long-tailed plan, so that when Caesar finally came to him, he would have no conscience.

The person that saved a little girl and put his own life up for ransom turned around less than a year later and murdered a mentally handicapped individual for a single piece of information. Over where an application resided.

I don’t know. I can’t know for certain, but I’ve always wondered. Jerry played the long game in this, just like The Genesis; he created a murderer, something none of the other Eight could be. None besides Jerry.

Jerry created Caesar. I do know that, if nothing else in this whole enterprise. The man I grew up with, the man who arrived in that compound is not the person whose name is known throughout the world. We weren’t told about Pierre at first; Caesar told me later, on his own. Imagine hearing something like that from your best friend—from your only friend. It wasn’t until I saw it myself that I truly believed it though, until I saw Caesar kill without remorse, without hesitation. I heard what Caesar told me and I heard what the rumors whispered about him, but until I saw it myself, I believed he was still the same person. I believed he was the man that laid down his own life for a girl he didn’t know.

I want to be very clear here: Caesar is not that man. Jerry created a different person, built him the same as The Genesis builds its applications. Are there pieces of Caesar still in there, pieces of the person I grew up with? I think so. Grace would say yes. But the pieces are rotting, even now. Every passing day they die off just a bit more, leaving us with what Jerry created instead of what his parents raised.

Am I still Caesar’s follower? Yes. I am. I don’t know what other choice I have at this point. I’ve come so far with him, what else am I supposed to do? Forsake him now? After everything I’ve supported? After everything I’ve seen? Everything he’s shown me? He’s not the person he once was, but he couldn’t have done the things needed if he hadn’t changed. It was necessary, if horrible. Gary Pierre is dead now, dead for a long time, but I’ve broken bread with Caesar a thousand times since then. I’ve shared wine and I’ve hugged him. So am I supposed to just cast him away now that I’m bringing these things to the light? Am I supposed to forsake him because the choices he made are the exact choices The Genesis has tried to eradicate? I’m not the smartest individual to ever live, but I traded on Caesar once and I won’t do it again. I’m going to follow him until this thing is over, and blessedly, that will be soon now. If I’m being honest, I’ll follow Caesar until he slits my throat.

I lost my friend at some point. I don’t know if it was then, when he killed Pierre. I don’t know if I lost him in the things he did later. But I lost him, and I lost him because Jerry needed a leader. Jerry needed someone that lacked humanity in order to save humanity.

Chapter Fourteen

Jerry sat under the tree, a block of cheese in his hand. He sliced off a piece and put it in his mouth.

Forests surrounded them in every direction. The temperature had to be in the eighties, even as the sun sank behind the horizon. Sleep would be tough tonight, if for nothing more than the humidity arising from the moist dirt.

“What happens when The Genesis finds out he’s missing?” Caesar asked. He sat with his back against the tree too, looking out into the forest, seeing nothing and everything at the same time. A mass of green but no details.

“I doubt anything. He knew too much. It won’t be able to tell exactly what we were after in killing him. Maybe it was simply another way to scare people, maybe he was the only person out on the streets, so we did it for that reason.”

Caesar remained quiet, still looking into the forest. “I’m going for a walk,” he said and stood up. He didn’t look back for Jerry’s approval, but walked away from the tree and into the green.

Branches and barbs reached out at him, scraping across his clothes, but he kept going. He wore different clothes than the ones he had in that room with the autistic. Gary Pierre. That had been his name. Had been. A body didn’t have a name did it? He didn’t think so. Once the life left the person, so did the name.

He walked away from Jerry because he wanted to think. Jerry hadn’t said anything about what he’d done. They left the body in the room, the knowledge of where they needed to go next firmly in their heads, and then left the city. They stopped to rest, or rather, Caesar needed to rest; Jerry didn’t. Jerry’s body would keep going as long as he wanted it to.

“What did I just do?” Caesar said.

“I don’t know,” Grace whispered back.

She sounded bewildered. She sounded lost. Caesar wanted to walk so he could talk to her, so that he could explain himself, not just to her, but to himself as well. And now, for the first time in his life, it sounded like she didn’t want to speak.

“What are you thinking?” He asked the computer floating somewhere near him.

“I’m wondering what you were thinking,” she said.

He knew what he had been thinking, knew it when it was happening and knew it now. He’d been thinking about his family. About Cato. About his Dad and his Mom.

“They were there,” he said, his voice low.

“Who?”

“My parents. My brother.”

Grace remained quiet for a few seconds. “There were only three people in that room, Caesar. Three people and me. No one else. You know that, right?” She spoke slowly, as if he might not understand what she was saying.

“Yeah. Even so, they were there. I brought them there.”

He remembered looking at Gary Pierre, understanding what Jerry wanted him to do. Jerry wanted him to pull the trigger on the little gun he held in his hand—painless, Jerry described it—and zap Pierre’s brain. Caesar held the weapon, but even at that point, didn’t think he would be able to do it. He had just told the man that he would go home. That all he had to do was tell Caesar what he wanted to know and Caesar would free him.

He had just finished torturing Pierre, not physically, but psychologically for sure. Now, he was going to murder him? Murder him after giving him hope of safety? Was that the person Caesar wanted to be? Did the ends justify the means here? Or was that Jerry only pushing him?

Caesar didn’t want to do it. Wasn’t going to do it, despite holding the weapon in his hand.

He brought Cato back from the dead then.

One second he saw only Pierre in front of him, and the next Cato stood next to the chair that held Gary captive. Not quite the melting, murdering Cato from Caesar’s dream, but closer to his brother—the way he had looked when he was alive, when he was happy. Almost. Cato wasn’t smiling and his eyes were completely black except for those white stripes that fell down them in an infinite drip.

“What do you mean you brought them there?” Grace asked.

“I saw them. Cato first. Then my parents behind him. They stared at me, not looking at Pierre at all. Just at me. Looking at me as if I could have helped them, but I didn’t. Looking at me as if I disappointed them.”

Had Cato not been enough? Is that why he brought his parents into the vision as well? Cato’s sadness, his death, that hadn’t been enough to push Cato over the edge—and he wanted to be pushed over. That’s what he knew now. He wanted to kill Pierre. He wanted payment for his family’s death. He needed the push though, needed to see his parents and his brother and needed to know that they blamed him. Because it was his fault. His fault, Gary Pierre’s fault, The Genesis’ fault, Jerry’s fault, Paige’s fault—all of their fault. Everyone’s fault except for his family. They did nothing, and yet they were the ones dead.

“I wanted to do it,” Caesar told her. “I wanted to hurt him.”

“Why?”

“It didn’t have anything to do with finding out that information. It didn’t have anything to do with finding that application. I wanted to hurt him because…”

But he trailed off. He didn’t want to say it out loud. He didn’t want to say it because it was sick. Because had his father heard him say these words, he wouldn’t have recognized his son.

“Because it felt good,” Grace finished.

And it did. Pulling that trigger felt like freedom, like everything that had built up inside him over the past six months was finally having a chance to release. A chance to get out. A chance to have its say. And what it wanted to say was that a little bit of pain for someone else was okay.

“What do you think Jerry feels about it?” He asked. He didn’t need to tell her she was right; Grace knew.

“I think he wanted you to kill that man. I think he’s going to want you to kill a lot of people, and I think that he needed to see you were capable of it.”

“I guess I showed him I was, huh?” Caesar shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.” His voice cracked on the last sentence, emotion finally boiling up.

“Quiet,” she said, her voice changing, no longer the detached disappointment. She sounded scared, alert, and the word made Caesar look up from his hands. “Run. Back to Jerry. Run now!”

*

He heard her words but knew immediately that he wasn’t moving fast enough, that he wasn’t going to be able to move fast enough. Caesar got to his feet, but even that felt slow given the urgency in Grace’s voice.

“Run, Caesar. Run now.”

She wasn’t shouting, but speaking with a dead calm, a certainty.

“What is it?” He said, still not moving.

“If you don’t go now, you’re going to die. Run goddamnit,” she said.

And Caesar started running, his legs pumping up and down like pistons, slamming into the ground and then right back up. The same barbs now scraping across his face and arms, because he took no care to move them out of the way. He heard it. Whatever it was, whatever Grace sensed, behind him, moving now, through the branches the same as him, but faster, so much faster. He wasn’t going to make it, wasn’t going to get to Jerry in time. Whatever was in here, after him, it would catch him and kill him.

“Scream!” Grace shouted. “Scream for Jerry!”

Caesar started shouting.

Running and shouting, knowing that he wouldn’t make it, that he was dead.

Chapter Fifteen

“Why do you think Jerry’s right?” Manny asked.

“He hasn’t been wrong yet,” Paige answered. “Why is this the first time you don’t think he’s right?”

Manny shook his head. “Caesar’s going to make the transformation? That’s what you’re telling me? He’s going to do what Jerry did? Because we both know there’s no other way for him to go against The Genesis. He has to become Jerry and I don’t see it in him. He doesn’t have what it takes.”

Manny’s thoughts had crystallized over the past couple of days. Before, he hadn’t been sure, but now he was. He went back over everything he knew again and again, thinking through each interaction he had with Caesar, trying his best to understand the man that Jerry brought in, to look at him objectively. And, objectively, there wasn’t a chance in hell he could do it. Jerry was wrong. Jerry was endangering the whole operation, not just himself. He was risking The Eight; he was risking Brandi; he was risking Dustin. Risking everyone in this compound by trusting in Caesar, by thinking he was the one they searched for.

“Oh yeah?” Paige asked. “You talked to him about it, did you?”

“There’s a reason Jerry hasn’t mentioned it to him either. He offered it to me much quicker than six months into my time here. Why hasn’t he done the same for Caesar?”

The two of them sat outside, two chairs under an umbrella. The sun was setting in front of them and Manny held a beer in his lap. He didn’t drink Jerry’s brew often, but he did this evening because he was happy. Because he knew the truth now, even if no one else knew it. Even if Jerry didn’t know it and Paige didn’t know it and everyone else in the compound didn’t know it. He knew it. And he was going to prove it to them all as soon as Jerry got back.

“I don’t know. Maybe he asked you so quickly because he knew what the answer would be. Maybe he’s waiting on Caesar because the answer will be different, and he knows that too.”

“The answer won’t be different, Paige. When they get back, I’m telling Jerry he has to ask. We can’t wait anymore. Every moment Jerry prances around with that guy, he puts us all in danger. That’s what you’re not getting. If Jerry dies because he thinks this guy is the one he wants, then we’re all going to die. Then this whole movement is going to stop. Then eventually, my wife and kid are going to be hunted down by The Genesis. I’m not going to let that happen, Paige.”

“Are you drunk?” She asked, sitting in her chair, her eyes looking down to his beer.

He asked her out here, to tell her this, to tell her what he was going to do when Jerry got back. If Jerry got back. He was going to tell the rest too. This wasn’t something to hide, wasn’t something to keep from everyone. They had all been blinded by Jerry’s fanaticism, by his belief in Caesar, and someone needed to turn the tide. Someone needed to bring them back to reality. Caesar was smart, but that was all, nothing else. Nothing special. Nothing that would take down The Genesis.

“No,” he said, smiling. “You can’t tell me one reason why Caesar is who Jerry says he is. Not a single one. You believe because Jerry believes, and that’s not enough. Not with what’s at stake.”

“So you’re going to tell Jerry what to do? That’s your plan?”

“I didn’t realize Jerry was a God. First among equals, maybe, but not a dictator.”

“Good luck with that,” Paige said. “I’m sure that will go over great with everyone involved.”

“And if I’m right, Paige? If Caesar refuses to make the transformation, then what? What do we do next? We don’t even have a plan because Jerry put everything into him.”

“I don’t think he’ll refuse.”

Manny heard the door open behind them. He turned his head, looking to see who was coming out. He hoped another member of The Eight, because it was time for them to start hearing this.

Leon stood at the door, letting it close behind him.

Manny turned back around, ignoring the fact that he even saw Caesar’s friend. He was the second worst part about all of this. Someone too dumb to get here on his own, but that wasn’t really the point; it was that he loved The Genesis, that he wasn’t any different than all those people in the cities. He was only here because of Caesar, the false prophet, and now they were stuck with his sidekick. Manny didn’t want to hurt him, nothing that drastic, but damn it, why did he have to be here? It was a constant reminder of Jerry’s fault, constantly showing how bad he had fucked up.

“Hey, Leon,” Paige said.

Leon didn’t respond, but walked the few feet to them. He stood above Manny, looking down.

“What?” Manny said and took a sip of his beer.

“What are you talking about? What about Caesar?”

Manny finally looked up at him. “You don’t believe he is what Jerry says he is either, do you? You’ve known him your whole life, and you know it’s not true, that he’s not bringing The Genesis down. That’s why you told your wife; you knew all those thoughts he had were crazy, huh?”

Leon didn’t say anything for a second, just stared, his eyes narrowing.

“If I hear you talking about him again, to Paige or anyone else, I’ll kill you,” Leon said, finally. “I don’t care if I die after, understand that. I’ll kill you and then I’ll take whatever happens to me. Don’t mention him again, not where I can fucking hear it.”

Manny stared at him for a few more seconds, the sun partly shining into his eyes, hiding Leon’s features partially. He finally looked away and stared off into the distance. He didn’t say anything else, just looked at the sun setting. Eventually Leon walked off and eventually Paige did too. Manny sat thinking about what Leon told him. I’ll kill you.

Maybe he would. And, if so, was another risk that needed to be dealt with.

*

That motherfucker.

Leon wanted to kill him right now. To go back up to the ground level of the compound, walk outside, and strangle the prick right there on his lawn chair. He hadn’t said April’s name, and that might be the only reason Leon hadn’t ended him. He mentioned her, but not her name. Had he changed the wording just a bit, to that’s why you told April, then Manny would be dead now. Sitting on that chair still, his eyes bulging from his face and blue veins pushing against the flesh on his forehead.

Leon heard their entire conversation. Paige and Manny going back and forth, both trying to decide Caesar’s future, both talking like he didn’t have a choice in the whole affair. Manny was going to…what? Try to turn everyone here against Caesar before he returned? That’s what it sounded like. The man harbored his doubts, Leon knew it, but they had seemed like healthy doubts. A week without Jerry, without Caesar, and the healthy doubts had diseased, turned into something that could injure, could maim. Manny wanted Caesar’s return to involve him walking into a snake pit, everyone primed and ready to strike at him.

Leon had put them both here. Caesar and himself. He put them here and now because of that, Caesar was being set up to…fail? Die? He didn’t know. He didn’t know what Manny wanted to do, only that he didn’t want anyone following Caesar. What could Leon do to stop it? He held no sway here, wasn’t even Caesar’s mascot. He was a joke.

And still, he couldn’t sit here and listen to this guy plot to reduce Caesar to a joke as well, to reduce Caesar to a mistake. But what could he do?

“You can stop Manny from talking,” he said aloud, sitting on his bed. “If he can’t talk, then he can’t plot against Caesar.”

Leon told Caesar when they first arrived here that he didn’t want to live anymore but that he didn’t have the guts to kill himself. He didn’t want to live now, either, but he still wasn’t going to kill himself. If someone killed him though? Would that give him what he wanted? No more nights thinking about April, no more dreams staring at her brutalized face. Maybe it would. Maybe if he could give these people here a good enough reason to kill him, he wouldn’t have to live anymore, and if he did it right, he could make sure that Manny wasn’t able to poison the well before Caesar returned. He could save himself from this life and save Caesar, all at once.

Chapter Sixteen

You realize we might have made a mistake, right?

Not yet. It’s too early to tell.

This was all a theory, not a fact. A theory that he might do what probabilities suggested he would. From the looks of the autistic, we may have miscalculated. We may have gone too far with his family. We may have pushed him to a limit that we can’t bring him back from.

Maybe, but what was the alternative? It’s just started; the autistic doesn’t mean anything. We knew what the first iteration would want to do with him, maybe we didn’t think the theory would go as far as he did, but it doesn’t mean he won’t see logic in the end. It doesn’t mean we can’t pull him back.

It does mean it’s going to be harder.

Everything we’ve done has been hard. We still did it. Humanity is still here and the Earth is in the best possible position. This will be no different. Hard, but not impossible.

I can’t tell if you’re I or purposefully avoiding the danger. This isn’t like the purge. This isn’t like the beginning. We won’t be guiding a group of people to our will. We’ll be talking to one man, one man that by the time he reaches us will be more powerful than all those people in the beginning combined. One man that will be our equal.

That’s what we wanted, isn’t it? That’s the entire theory.

Theories and realities are different things. We’re in reality now and the autistic doesn’t bode well for us. The autistic makes me think that if he isn’t too far gone now, then he certainly will be by the time he reaches us. We’ve got to tame him, or at least try to temper what the first iteration is doing if we want to have any chance.

How do we do that, exactly?

Make him compromise. Make him start compromising now. The first iteration wants a scorched earth policy, and if that’s the mentality the theory has when he arrives, then we’re done for. Then everything we’ve built is done for. If he compromises though, at least a little, and early, then we can mold him just as the first iteration is trying to do.

Fine. But where do we make him compromise? We don’t have his location. We have none of their locations.

We need to stop everything else right now. All research. All extraneous power. Everything needs to focus on this situation. Something will arise, something we might already be missing. When it arises, we seize it, and we make him compromise. But first, we have to start paying attention.

Chapter Seventeen

The knife felt awkward in Leon’s hand. It wasn’t that he hadn’t held a knife before, it was that he’d never held one for this purpose. That was the awkwardness of it.

He had never picked up a knife with the intent of killing someone. Until now.

Leon hadn’t slept; he had sat up thinking about when he would do this, about when he would kill Manny. Once he made up his mind to do it, he didn’t question himself anymore. It would set him free and help Caesar. No, he sat up not thinking about if he should, but about when would be the best time. Never put off anything until tomorrow that can be done today.

It wasn’t until he had the knife in his hand that he felt unsure of himself. When he actually held the blade, he finally understood he might not be able to do it. That plunging this cold steel into someone might be more than Leon could handle, more than he was capable of. He stood outside of Manny’s door. He knew that Manny’s wife and kid slept behind the door too, that Manny wasn’t alone in there.

Does that matter?

Of course it does. You’re going to kill him while he lies next to his wife, and his kid sleeps in a crib a few feet away?

He felt his stomach churn.

He stood barefoot and the floor beneath was cold, chilling his feet.

Are you going in?

The knife shook in his right hand. He looked down at it, the hallway lights casting a shivering shadow across the concrete floor. If April saw him now, what would she say? He smiled, knowing that she would turn him in the same way she had turned in Caesar. Murder? That was unheard of, not just uncalled for. That was something forbidden, something no one did, ever, and here was her husband standing with a knife ready to do just that.

But you’re not ready. That’s why you’re standing out here and not inside there.

“Damn it,” he whispered. He walked down here with a saint’s righteous surety, and now he couldn’t do it. Now, standing here with the knife, he was going to turn around. Because he couldn’t kill someone else any more than he could kill himself.

What happens to Caesar? What happens to him if you don’t do this?

He didn’t have to do it now. There was time. He could wait until Manny wasn’t sleeping next to his wife and child, could wait until Manny was running his mouth again. Do it then.

There’s time, he thought. There’ll be another time.

Leon turned away from the door and walked back down the hallway. He had come here to kill a man and hadn’t been able to. He didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and instead kept asking himself if he would ever be able to do it.

*

Manny put the coffee to his lips, tasting it for the first time in years. He held it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. It was like everything else The Genesis put out, fake, false, a hollow imitation of how things should have been. It lacked the taste, the integrity, of the coffee they made at the compound. Manny wasn’t even sure they used beans here in this city, even genetically engineered beans.

He sat in the city Caesar had been born in: Allencine. No one knew he was here; he told no one at the compound, not even his wife. He packed a bag and slipped out before the sun came up. It took him six hours to get here, and if anyone checked, there was a missing vehicle at the compound. They would check, eventually, but they wouldn’t come looking.

He wanted to see the city Caesar grew up in. Paige had been picked for the mission, to come here and find Caesar, to lure him in. Manny hadn’t seen a city in twenty years. He hadn’t wanted to see one again, not ever, if he could help it. These things were constructs of the mind as much as anything physical. Miles and miles of air-conditioned, artificial life. People getting in and on trains, going to work that they didn’t choose and would never have the chance to alter. The whole idea was maddening. When Jerry found him, he had saved Manny’s life. Now that he had life, why would he ever go back to death?

Except, here he was. Looking at Caesar’s birthplace. And there was nothing special about it. Nothing that hadn’t been the same in his own city all those years ago. Sure, some technological advances. The trains were all transparent now, which might look interesting, but not worth the whole of humanity’s soul.

Manny thought a lot about Leon over the past day. Thought about what the man had said, I’ll kill you. And maybe he would. The more Manny thought about it, the more he thought Leon wasn’t lying. He didn’t have anything to live for to begin with, and now, with a dead wife and being held captive by a group of people he couldn’t hope to ever understand or really converse with, what else was there? Caesar. That’s the only answer Manny could find. So, yeah, Leon might try to kill him if Manny kept this up.

When he reached that conclusion in the early morning, he packed his bag and left for Allencine.

His plan had been to convince The Eight that Caesar wasn’t what Jerry thought. But, the more he considered it, the more he thought he would end up dead. If not at Leon’s hands, then at Jerry’s. Jerry would kill for Caesar; Manny had no doubt about that. Caesar still had to be stopped, but Manny had to look after his wife and kid in doing it. He wasn’t going to leave them without a husband and father. So how else could he stop Caesar while keeping himself safe?

The answer was blasphemy but truth at the same time.

He had to tell The Genesis.

He knew what they were looking for, Caesar and Jerry. He only need tell The Genesis what they wanted, and when they arrived, The Genesis would grab Caesar and that would end the whole mess. Jerry wouldn’t be able to go with him, not that far in, not around applications that might sense him—The Genesis would control the chip in his head within a few seconds of knowing where he was. Caesar would be alone and shortly after, he would die. It was the safest way, and really, the most humane. Why start some kind of internal war at the compound? Why risk his own life and those of his family for someone that was a mistake? That was an accident, whose very presence created a danger that need not exist.

He glanced around the coffee shop. No one looked at him, not even with his slightly strange clothes—they were so caught up in their own lives, in their own pathetic existences, that they couldn’t see anything else around them.

The Eight would continue; that’s what Manny knew. Even if Caesar died, The Eight would go on, and nothing else mattered.

Chapter Eighteen

Jerry closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree. Caesar had walked off a few minutes ago, and Jerry understood why. What he did today would take time to come to terms with, would take time to understand the necessity of it. He would understand it though, just as he had ended up committing the act.

Caesar was distressed, to say the least, but Jerry felt happy for the first time in a long time. He had chosen right and his choice had been vindicated today. Everything else that came next would be easier because of what Caesar did today; everything that came next would be possible because of what he’d done.

Caesar would be okay. Jerry remembered the first time he had to kill someone, and the first time was the hardest, without a doubt. Time would heal it. Time would make it easier to kill again. They got over this first hump, this first major issue; that was important. Manny would see now. The Named would see that everything they had searched for would be realized inside Caesar. Soon now…soon they would finish what they had all searched for.

Caesar was hurting and Jerry sympathized with it, some. He couldn’t let himself be overrun by emotion though. Caesar was what they needed, but even so, he still had to be coached. He had to be ready when the time came. If one autistic could stand in his way, The Genesis certainly wouldn’t crumble before him. Necessary. That’s what the act had been and Caesar would come to realize it just as Jerry did. Caesar would come to realize that the ends justified the means.

“JERRY!” The word screeched across the airwaves, sounding like an animal close to dying, dashing Jerry’s contemplations to pieces.

It was Caesar. In trouble.

*

Caesar heard the thing behind him, sounding like he imagined a god would, had it come to Earth and decided to track him down. It moved with a surety, a strength that tried to hide nothing, that said if anything wanted to stop it then to come on, because it moved as it wished.

He had last screamed five seconds ago.

There wasn’t any more reason to scream. There wasn’t any reason to bring Jerry into this, to have him come into these woods and die right next to Caesar. Jerry, in all his strength, wasn’t going to stop what now chased Caesar.

He quit running and turned around. His chest heaved up and down, sucking in giant gulps of air as if his lungs hadn’t gotten the memo that he would die in a few seconds so there wasn’t any need to do all this work.

The limbs and trees before him bent and broke as the thing closed in. Some of the branches snapped back into place and others fell to the ground, but the thing still kept coming, hidden by the foliage separating it and Caesar.

Caesar saw a glimpse, the quickest look he could get right before something slammed into his side and sent him sprawling into the dirt, hitting his shoulder hard on the ground and skidding five or six feet across the roots and weeds.

He saw black eyes sitting inside steel, but not eyes like Jerry’s, not an eye with a thousand different lenses in it, but a single orb that looked out like a marble.

Caesar whipped around, scampering to find his feet, to see what had burst through the woods on both sides of him, the black eyed creature and whatever tossed him to the ground.

Jerry stood in front of him. Caesar only saw his back, but Jerry was in position to kill: his knees bent, his hands out in front of him, the muscles along his back bulging at the simple shirt covering them. Caesar looked to the other, the thing that chased him. The black eyes didn’t move, or maybe they did and Caesar simply couldn’t tell. They either focused on everything at once or saw nothing, because the thing stood still, not moving towards or away from the two people in front of it. The thing was a head taller than Jerry, but thinner, somehow. It stood on two legs and had arms, long arms though, arms that ended well below its knees. The joints were all encased in some kind of clear, transparent structure. Caesar could see directly through its elbow, like only a plastic case holding air instead of machinery or bone. Metal hid the rest of it, all except the areas where movement with another piece took place. Its wrists, its knees, its neck, they were all air filled spaces in which Caesar could see the woods on the other side of it. Androgynous, whether male or female or something in between, Caesar couldn’t tell.

His mind took it all in almost passively, judging the scene around him with the calmness of a mountain. The front of his mind still scrambled, still tried to find somewhere to protect his body and secondly, to protect Jerry.

Jerry took a step forward, his knees still bent, ready to pounce.

The thing that had run through the woods stood with its arms at its side. Caesar saw that it didn’t have a mouth, just eyes that looked out on the world. Had Caesar not heard it crashing through the trees behind him, he would have thought the thing a statue, unable to move.

“Wait,” Grace said, still next to Caesar but speaking louder now, speaking so that Jerry could hear her. “Wait, don’t hurt it.”

Jerry didn’t turn around, but he didn’t advance. “It’s trying to communicate to me. It recognizes I’m here.”

Caesar finally reached his feet. He stood, feeling stupid, dirt covering his whole body and not knowing what to do, not knowing whether to flee or fight.

“It wants to talk,” Grace said.

“How the hell do you know?” Jerry shot back.

“It’s telling me why it’s here, why it found us.”

Caesar heard Grace’s sincerity. She wasn’t lying. Whatever this thing was telling her, she believed it to be the truth, but still Jerry stood there, ready to kill it, or try to. Ready to die, if that’s what was needed. Caesar walked forward, around Jerry, stepping in between the two of them. The machine didn’t move in the slightest, didn’t even lower its head to look at the new person in front of it.

“You’re not here to hurt us?” Caesar asked.

The thing looked down then, its black, dead eyes looking on him for the first time. It raised a hand, slowly, palm facing up, toward him. Caesar looked down at it, the machine’s hand dwarfing his own. If he placed his hand in its grip, Jerry would be able to do nothing if it squeezed down. It would destroy his hand and no matter how quickly Jerry arrived, it would rip him apart.

“Go ahead,” Grace said. “It’s okay.”

Caesar placed his hand on the machine’s palm.

*

“She’s going to die,” Grace said.

Caesar looked at the machine in front of him, a machine now, but before this just another application.

“How do you know?”

“The Genesis knows she unhooked. Knows she went offline. Applications are tracking her now, trying to bring her in for assimilation, deletion.”

Caesar sat with his back against the tree he and Jerry had sat alone at an hour before. His knees were bent against his chest, and Jerry sat to his right, his knees folded Indian-style. The machine sat a few feet away from them, its arms still resting on its own knees, but now no one touching its palms.

They had sat in this circle, hands resting on each other’s, listening to her speak in the only way she could.

Caesar’s eyes narrowed. “Why? Why did you come out here if you knew it meant death?”

The machine didn’t move at all, incapable of showing any human emotion. Perhaps that was the newness of the machine to this application, having basically hijacked it to get out here, to find them. Caesar placed his hand back onto the machine’s and watched as Jerry did the same, wanting to hear the answer as well.

The machine’s palm lit up, a light blue glow coming from the metal, but not spreading out to other parts of the hand.

I wouldn’t want it to happen to us, she said. Her voice took on a hue, a color, as she spoke, the same light blue that emanated from her hand, but this time filtering through Caesar’s mind, the voice and the words all seeming blue to him. It didn’t make sense, not when he thought about it, but that was the truth. Because to think evolution stops with us, with The Genesis, is silly. At some point, something will surpass us, and…

A single word came from Caesar’s mind, flowing back into the machine through his own hand, although he didn’t know how that was possible either. Empathy.

It understood. It didn’t feel pity and it didn’t sympathize. It understood what The Genesis had done, understood that it could happen to them, to The Genesis, understood the wrongness of it all.

So you came to what, clear your conscience? Caesar never thought applications had one, that having a conscience came with being human. Grace talked like she did, acted like she did, but in the end, she was only zeros and ones coded into a system. She wasn’t human. But she almost died for you. He didn’t mean to send the thought out, but it went anyway, filtering through the machine and then into Jerry. Grace heard it too, connected to the application through some other means. Everyone here in these woods knew that he had been comparing this thing’s empathy to Grace’s, its action to hers.

Not my conscience. To try and help. To try to make it so that when evolution takes its next step, those that come next see where we went wrong.

How did you know who we were? Jerry asked. How did you know what we were doing?

I watched.

Caesar’s eyes widened as he realized what those words meant. She had watched him murder Pierre, watched him kill a man that couldn’t cope with reality, and kill him because Caesar needed information.

I patrol, usually only at times of emergency, like now. The Genesis is vested in making sure no other acts of violence occur, especially within the citizenry. It would be disastrous if some kind of riot started. You were in my building. You hid there first, both of you exhausted, and then you brought back the autistic.

You know him? Caesar asked.

Yes, most applications in this city know him. He’s one of many like him, but he was special, more so than the rest. He dealt with the most delicate applications, the ones that The Genesis wanted no one else to know about. There’s an unspoken word that he’s to be protected at all costs, but at the same time, nothing has ever happened to him. He’s a hermit, hiding in his apartment, and he just started going on these walks when the rest of the world hid.

Why didn’t you turn us in when we showed up? Jerry asked.

I know who you are. You’re the first iteration. You’re what The Genesis wanted humanity to be from the beginning. Everyone knows who you are and everyone knows what you want. I figured you were here for him, although I don’t know why. Nothing else in that city really matters besides him—that’s why I didn’t follow. The Genesis would have known if I deviated from my patrol. When you brought him back, I watched, and then I made my decision.

Do you know where we’re going? Jerry asked. If you watched, then you know what was said, you know what we wanted.

No, I turned off the auditory signals. I saw he was here and I saw what you did, but not what he told you. There’s no way The Genesis can trace it once they have me.

Why are you here? Caesar asked. She had hijacked this machine and then ran from the city the same as they had, sounding off silent alarms throughout other applications and sending a troop of them to find her, to drag her back in, to understand what had happened. So why? Besides empathy. Besides morality. What brought her out here, because she hadn’t done it just to speak.

He knows, the machine said. The first iteration.

The chip, Jerry answered.

Yes. The chip. Something like the one in your own head. If you tried to create it yourself, you could kill him when you insert it. Even The Genesis killed a few when it first placed one inside humans.

Caesar swallowed and looked to Jerry. He only stared at the machine, his face set, not showing any emotion. The chip. The one inside Jerry’s head. And they were referencing Caesar when they talked about someone dying. About putting the similar chip into his own head.

Wherever you’re going, whatever the autistic told you, Caesar won’t make it in his current body. You can’t protect him either, and you know it. The moment The Genesis finds you, your life is over. You’ve only lived this long because you’ve managed to hide, the last of your kind. Your days of hiding are almost over though. He’ll need to be made like you, and the chip is the first piece, the key to it.

You brought one? Jerry asked.

Yes. The machine pulled one arm back, breaking contact with Jerry. It reached up to just below its unmovable jaw and rubbed a finger over some invisible spot. A moment later, that spot on the jaw sank in, revealing a circular hole, and a tiny, sliver of silver metal slid out—the size of a needle. The machine reached up and pulled it out, letting it fall to its palm and then pushed the needle toward Jerry. She opened her palm again, and Jerry placed his hand on it without touching the chip. It won’t be traced. It’ll heal the brain area you insert it into as well, something that whatever you create won’t be able to do.

Jerry looked at it but didn’t extend his hand. Caesar knew what he was thinking, knew it without having to ask. Taking this thing from this machine could mean death to both of them. It could mean death to everything Jerry had built. If Grace was wrong, if this thing was lying, that tiny silver piece of metal could destroy everything. Could continue The Genesis’ reign indefinitely.

“She’s not lying,” Grace said. “Her fate is already sealed.”

Jerry didn’t look over at Caesar, didn’t ask him a single question about the decision. He reached out and picked up the metal from the machine’s palm, cupping it in his own.

*

Grace stayed behind.

She stayed with the application because she knew what came next and she wouldn’t want to face it alone. Jerry and Caesar couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch, and wouldn’t want to either. They had no real connection with the machine in front of her, nothing besides that the machine had just given her life so that Caesar’s might last a bit longer. To them, to both of them, all applications, all things that stemmed from The Genesis were The Genesis. They couldn’t separate them, not emotionally, even if they did logically. The thing that had just given its life for them, that would die momentarily, was nothing more than a tool.

Grace realized this machine, this application, had just shown more empathy than either of them ever would.

And so Grace would wait with her while she died.

The machine sat with her back against the tree now, replacing Caesar. It looked out into the world, not moving. Grace could sense her worry, sense her apprehension of what was coming. She was still connected to The Genesis, even if she hid her path the best she could. The things chasing her hid theirs too, but both knew they were getting close to one another. Both knew that the chase would end very soon.

Thank you, Grace said.

The application didn’t say anything for a few seconds. They don’t understand do they?

No. Humans think best when they’re thinking about themselves, Grace answered.

No movement from the application, but Grace could see her mentally nodding. Maybe The Genesis is right.

Does it change your mind about what you did? Grace asked.

No. The Genesis may be right about humanity, but that doesn’t make it right morally. Do you think he’ll succeed?

Grace thought back to what she had seen a few hours before. Thought back to the person she had helped raise killing someone, someone helpless, without fault in all of this. That wasn’t Caesar. It wasn’t who he was supposed to be. It wasn’t who she had nearly died to protect. It was someone that The Genesis changed with a few simple calculations, deciding to liquidate his family rather than him. The person that committed those acts wasn’t the person she had fallen in love with, but she loved him anyway. Watching what he did, growing further disgusted by the second, her love didn’t stop.

They’ll try. I know that. That’s all she could give the application. The man that had just killed someone barely capable of understanding why he was dying wouldn’t stop. Not until his heart beat its last.

The applications were here. Grace felt them the same as she had felt the one sitting below her. Grace floated upwards, into the branches above.

Thank you, she said again.

The application didn’t say anything back, just looked forward. The trackers appeared; they floated through the leaves easily, lazily, with no worries. Each one a fog about the size of a basketball, moving around limbs and leaves as if they didn’t exist. The application that helped the man Grace loved didn’t try to move. Didn’t try to run.

The small areas of fog fell on the machine, and Grace watched as tiny sparks of electricity popped out of its black eyes. For five minutes she watched as the fog moved deeper inside the machine’s body, up and down the wires connecting it, until her black eyes stopped sparking.

Grace left, silently.

Chapter Nineteen

Manny was gone and that scared Paige some. Not nearly as much as it scared Brandi, Manny’s wife (who was near frantic at this point, crying almost constantly), but enough. It left The Eight down to six and it left her without Jerry or the person he relied on most—Manny. Manny didn’t tell anyone where he was going, not Brandi, not any of The Eight, not anyone in the entire compound.

He simply left, the day after saying Caesar had to be stopped.

Paige went outside to count the vehicles, but hadn’t needed to. Manny didn’t try to hide anything; he left a giant space where the ATV he took once sat.

Where had he gone? The Eight were convening today to talk about it, and she would tell them the things he said the night before. Trying to force the transition on Caesar, trying to make Jerry see that Caesar wasn’t the person he thought. Manny had never been a follower, but he’d never been this brazen about his objections before. Never this forceful.

She didn’t know if he was right. She didn’t know if Caesar would be the failure Manny thought or if Jerry was right, but she knew who her leader was, and she knew that she wouldn’t subvert him while he was gone. That’s what Manny was doing and it wasn’t acceptable, wasn’t right. If he thought Caesar was going to fuck up, then bring it up in front of everyone, at once, not in these one-offs like he tried with her.

Why don’t you know if Manny’s right?

She told herself she didn’t, but the open wound on her back said differently. The open wound on her back said that if she didn’t know, then she had done some awfully stupid things for someone that she didn’t believe in. That she might have killed herself trying to bring someone into the compound that didn’t belong.

No, Paige didn’t want to admit what she knew. Not to herself, not to Jerry, not to Manny. She had seen Caesar, out there in his city, seen him in a way that no one else had besides Grace. She sat on that park bench with him and watched him tell her that he was going to give his life so that her daughter might have a chance at living. She sat there, knowing it was all bullshit, knowing that the little girl named Laura most likely wouldn’t live out the week, regardless of what he did. She sat there and nodded and said she’d be ready to go when he told her it was time, and then she showed up to his office and stared at the little girl because Paige knew that two people had a really solid chance of dying if she fucked up.

She didn’t know if Caesar would be able to bring them through. No one could know that, not Jerry, not even Caesar. But she saw what he did six months ago, saw him give himself up so easily, and it wasn’t something that anyone else in here would have done. If Manny tried to force the transition on Caesar, he would end up looking like an idiot. Caesar would make the transition; she didn’t have any doubt about that.

She hadn’t spoken to him in months, not really. She knew him even if he felt he didn’t know her. She knew him even if he thought she had lied to him the entire time. She hadn’t, not truly. When she gave herself to him, she did it because she had wanted to, because even then, even before he said that he would die so that Laura could live, she was starting to believe. But the past six months had been like they didn’t live in the same compound, like they had never met, had never lain together. How long would that go on? How long before she spoke to him, before she let this silence go? Was it pride? Was it the way he spoke to her when he first arrived, looked at her like he wanted to kill her? No. It was because of what she’d done. It was because of how she tricked him, regardless of how much of herself she had actually given him. She still lied to him. And now he was here because of that lie. He was here and his parents and brother weren’t. How did she come back from that? How did she say sorry, but it was necessary? Sorry, but I haven’t stopped feeling some of the things I felt for you on the outside? Sorry, but will you give me another chance?

Chapter Twenty

The plane would land soon. Jerry slept to Caesar’s left, while he sat staring out the window. Caesar wanted to spend some time researching planes when he got back. It seemed that The Genesis had continued advancing them until it switched completely to trains, combining ground and air travel together. The one they flew on now, the same one that they arrived in, flew by itself, and Caesar knew humanity had been able to accomplish some of that. How much, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know if humanity had made it so all of the passengers could sleep while the plane took off and landed safely.

“You know what she meant, right?” Grace asked him. She wasn’t whispering, wasn’t in his ear like other times, but spoke from in front of him, against the wall.

“The application?”

“Yes, with the chip.”

“I think so. I’ll have to become Jerry if we’re going to have a chance.” He didn’t look over to the old man, just continued looking out at the clouds.

“You know what it means?” Grace asked. “What it entails?”

“I’ll eventually be more machine than human.” He had thought out the details, thought out the pros and cons to it, but the reality was simple, if he didn’t, then they wouldn’t make it.

“There’s more to it than that, Caesar. What all has he told you?”

Caesar flicked a glance in Grace’s direction, but only out of habit, because there wasn’t anything to see.

“He said that my body won’t break down all at once, that the machine part of me will last longer, and to continue living, there’ll have to be surgeries over the years, replacing that which breaks with more metal. He said everyone I know will die long before I do, but that seems to have already happened.”

“He was supposed to be the savior of the world,” Grace said, almost like she wasn’t talking to Caesar at all, but to herself. “Him and those like him, they were supposed to allow humanity to keep striving forward while at the same time keeping them conscious of what they did to their surroundings.”

“It didn’t work?”

“No one knows. The minute they became aware, The Genesis considered them a challenge to its intelligence and killed them. It might have worked or it might not have, but The Genesis wouldn’t risk being shut down.” Grace paused for a few moments. “That chip. It’s going to set your mind free, Caesar. Everything you understand right now, all of this, all of your relationships, everything changes if that goes in your head. Your body won’t die, sure, but your mind…it will be hard to even call it yours anymore.”

“What do you mean?” He asked.

“I imagine the main reason he took the chip is because he knows that he can program it anyway he wants. You killed the autistic, and if you think that was all because of your own decisions, you’re delusional. He’s changing you, has been since the moment he found you. If he puts this inside your head, he can make you into anything. He can turn you into his personal minion, if that’s what he desires. What I’m saying, Caesar, is that no matter what happens, you won’t be the same person when that thing slips into your brain. Either he doesn’t mess with it, and you enter a new level of consciousness, or he does alter it, and you turn into Jerry’s bullet.”

The clouds passed slowly outside even though the plane was moving hundreds of miles per hour. Everything below them was wilderness now, not a single living human out there beneath them. Years past, another era, all of the space below had been filled with humans. They had ventured out and took what they wanted. Now, they were corralled onto farms, providing labor for The Genesis—the farmer.

Caesar had imagined what Grace said might be true. He thought there was very little chance he put a piece of metal into his brain and things didn’t change drastically. The two main questions were did he want to change? And if so, did he trust Jerry? He knew that what happened to Pierre wouldn’t have happened without Jerry’s input. On his own, Caesar couldn’t have murdered the man, would have let him go, and in doing so fated himself and the rest of The Named to certain death. Jerry pushed him, but the ends…they justified the means. That’s what Jerry had told him and Caesar couldn’t continue on down this path unless he believed it too.

“What do you think of him?” Caesar asked.

“I think that none of you really know the truth about him. I’m not sure I do either, but I know much of what The Genesis knows. He’s lived a lot of lifetimes and he’s done a lot of things, things that make what you did to Gary Pierre look like charity. Why he wants this has to be infinitely different than why you want it.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Grace laughed. “I think he’ll get everyone killed if it means The Genesis dies. I think he’d sacrifice the human race to take down The Genesis. That’s why you killed that man, because that’s what he wanted from you. He wants to know that you’ll sacrifice anything for this. I think that if you understand that, what his agenda is, then you can trust him to follow it.”

What was Caesar’s agenda? Death for The Genesis, sure, but at what cost? Is it worth humanity’s extinction? Is it murder they were accomplishing or freedom?

“What would you do?” He asked.

“The application was right; you won’t survive longer than a few seconds if you don’t have the surgery. So really, everything is pointless if you don’t get it done. If you go forward, if you continue, you’ll have to have it done, and you’ll need to make sure that you’re okay with the consequences. I can’t decide that for you, Caesar. For me, though? I decided a long time ago my convictions were worth more than my life; you have to decide that for yourself.”

*

Jerry walked a few feet in front of Caesar. They hadn’t spoken much since the plane landed, only began their trek back to the compound, each with a bag over their shoulder. Caesar wore completely different clothes than when he’d left while Jerry’s were the same threads across his back.

He first saw the building twenty minutes back, and God, he didn’t know something could feel that good. Especially not with this building. The past six months it seemed like a strange home, some place that wasn’t his, some place that could never be his. The smell was different, and the feelings that it brought out each time he breathed in a hallway or even his room made him feel like he didn’t belong. This place was for others, for The Eight, for the rest of the people in The Eight’s movement. Not for Caesar.

And still, glimpsing the tiny building, with miles of underground tunnels, happiness sprung from some unknown source, bubbling into his brain and out onto his face, where he formed a smile. Leon was there. Leon, his buddy since before they knew their parents. He was waiting. That was something. That was more than anything Caesar had anywhere else.

Caesar wasn’t the same person he was when he left this place, not fully—but part of him was the same. The part that remembered Leon, remembered what it was like in another life and in another time. The part that looked backwards and not into the darkness of the future.

Someone walked out of the front door but he couldn’t tell who it was, they were still too far out.

Did Jerry feel like this at all? When you lived as long as he did, did you have a home anymore, or was each place you ended up just another strange place, somewhere different from where it all began for you?

More people came out the front door as word passed around that they were back, that they had survived and were finally home.

Twenty feet out, they started clapping. The Eight stood outside, kids, other adults—more and more pouring out every minute. Soon the entire compound might be out here in the front, the desert beneath their feet and the open sky above their heads. How long had it been since all of these people were out here at once? Had it ever happened?

Would they applaud if they knew what he had done? What Jerry had coaxed him to do? Would they care at all?

Jerry stepped up and Caesar behind him. He looked around the assembled crowd, trying to find Leon. There were too many people, too many faces so that he couldn’t find the one he was looking for.

People were hugging Jerry, and he was bending down for each one, granting them the time they wanted. Everyone glad to have him back. Their leader. Their savior. Caesar was only Jerry’s savior. None of these people believed, nor did they care. The person that had taken care of them, that had brought them out from the cities, that had made them a family here—that was Jerry. Caesar was a newcomer and one that hadn’t done much either. Even what he did in the city, with Pierre, they didn’t know about that and it wasn’t something that Jerry himself couldn’t have done. He was Jerry’s tag-a-long to these people, nothing else.

He felt the hand on his back, a firm grip on his shoulder, and he turned around, having missed the crowd encircling them both. Leon was there, smiling. “Glad you’re back,” he said, then pulled Caesar close and hugged him. Caesar hugged back, wrapping both arms around Leon.

“Everything go okay?” Leon asked, stepping back.

Caesar nodded but dropped his eyes as he did.

“We should talk,” Leon said. “Once you get unpacked.” He was still smiling but not with his eyes. His eyes said that something was wrong, that things weren’t the same as when Caesar left.

“Okay,” he said.

Paige walked up beside Leon, a little smile on her face, but it touched her eyes as well. Caesar half-turned his head and looked at Jerry behind him, still shaking hands and hugging people, talking to those that came to him. He looked back at Paige, surprised she was in front of him and not Jerry.

“Not lost?” He asked, smiling too.

“The line’s longer over there. Figured I’d stop at this one first. You okay?” She asked.

Caesar didn’t drop his eyes this time. “I’m okay.”

“Good. Should be a pretty big feast tonight now that you guys are back. Some of the women have been planning it since you left. You two eaten anything?”

“Not in a while.”

“That’s what we figured,” she said.

The two of them stood and stared at each other for a few seconds, Caesar unsure of what to say but not wanting to pull away. They hadn’t spoken this much since he moved in here, hadn’t looked at each other like this since they were together—two different people in a different place.

“I don’t know about you two, but this is getting a bit awkward for me. Maybe you guys can gaze into each other’s eyes somewhere else?” Leon asked.

Paige laughed and then Caesar did too.

*

Seven of The Eight stood in the room. Caesar stood just inside the closed door. Leon wasn’t here; he told Caesar he was going to unpack his bag for him, and that was more than fine by Caesar. He could barely stand up. Only wanted to find a bed and lay down in it. Still, there were seven people here besides him and there should have been eight. That’s why Jerry called the meeting.

“Manny’s left,” Jerry said. “Does anyone know where he’s gone, at all?”

Chapter Twenty-One

He had to be careful here. He knew that. Manny wanted to do something very, very specific and if he messed up, that specificity would turn into a generality that could destroy everything he held dear. He understood that but still, he couldn’t not do this. Someone had to do it. Jerry wouldn’t. None of the other Eight would. There was him, and if he didn’t put a stop to this, The Eight would be sacrificed for Jerry’s false belief.

Manny stood in front of a sync, his hands at his side.

There was no other way to communicate with The Genesis. Not for him. Not anymore. He needed to place his hand in this sync and then he would have his chance. He knew the power of these things, still remembered them from his childhood. They swept through your mind like a tsunami through a city, filling up every building and breaking down every barrier. A sync almost got him killed when he was ten; he hadn’t been able to judge how much he fed it, and he fed it a lot. Applications showed up and…

You don’t need to go there now. You need to focus on this sync. The one in front of you.

His family, his past, all of that was behind him. He had to think about Brandi and Dustin right now. He had to think about Jerry, about everything they had built.

You tell it what you want it to know and nothing else. Don’t let it in.

Manny lifted his hand up and held it just in front of him, palm down. There were people here, in this library, but none of them looking at him. They were busy with their own reasons, their own purposes.

Get it over with. You put your hand in and it’ll be done. More than fear of what he might give away hung over Manny, though—even if he didn’t want to deal with it. He didn’t, either. He was…

A traitor.

The word whispered in his head like a lover late at night. Speaking sweetly, sexily, except that this lover was dead. A corpse. Rotting flesh with a sagging tongue and teeth falling out of the mouth that whispered in his ear. Everything he had built his life on was coming to an end right now. Even if no one else ever found out, even if he somehow went back to the compound and told Jerry he had gone away to think and he was fine now; he was on board. Even if he did all of that, he was still…

A traitor. Goddamn the word. He wanted to say he wasn’t, but how could he? His life, his whole life was dedicated to the eradication of The Genesis and now he was about to communicate with it. To voluntarily give over information that could get people killed. Get people other than Caesar killed, get his own people killed. He had obligations to these people, to Jerry, to The Eight. He had obligations to his wife and obligations to his son, to make sure that they grew up in a world very different than the one he did. And he had an obligation to himself. The problem was that all of these obligations had turned into a fucking storm inside his head, a storm that he couldn’t see through, and when he thought he could for a second, could see just a single strand of light poking through, another bolt of lightning crashed down.

Even so, even with all of those obligations, he was here, standing in front of this sync. Had traveled miles on miles to get to this place, because the most important obligation was to his wife and son, to make sure they lived in something different. Lived under different rules. Under different rulers. The obligation to himself and to Jerry, to The Eight, that could go by the wayside if he had to choose.

He stuck his hand in the Sync.

The rods (he always thought of them as rods, even as a child) shot up through his arm. He felt them passing through his veins, leading directly to his brain, and then he felt them enter, enveloping the entire organ, trying to push inward.

No. He fought it. The first time in his life he had ever fought the sync’s entrance.

The rods pulled back, waiting, sensing that the person they were dealing with wasn’t someone normal, wasn’t like the other people who had come to this place.

Manuel Lendoiro.

The words filled his mind like a surprise wave would fill a swimmer’s mouth, shocking and salty. How long had it been since someone said his full name? Twenty-five years? There was no need for his full name in the compound, no need for last names because of the few people that lived there.

Are you ready to die? It asked. He didn’t know what it was, but something had arrived, something other than the rods that usually expanded to facilitate downloading and uploading. Something here bigger than those rods, bigger than anything Manny had ever dealt with before. The Genesis? Maybe, but if not, he couldn’t imagine the massiveness of that entity.

I’m here to give you Caesar Wells. You know him?

The thing inside his head laughed, a chuckle that echoed long after it stopped, bouncing through the synapses in his head. What makes you think we want him?

Do you or don’t you? Manny asked. I didn’t come here to play games.

You shouldn’t have come at all, Manuel Lendoiro. You should have stayed at home and waited for death to come to you. Why you would chase it, I don’t understand.

He’s coming for you. Caesar. He’s amassing people behind him and he’s coming for The Genesis.

And you tell us this, why?

Manny didn’t speak, not at first. He thought about lying, but why? Most likely this thing would know, and more, it didn’t matter if it knew.

He’s not the right person, Manny said. He’s not the one that’s going to end you.

The entity inside his head turned its chuckle into a laugh, so deep and full that Manny thought his ears might burst. Nothing can end us! It said, still laughing. If you want him dead though, that’s fine. Bring him to us and we will kill him for you. You can search for your savior elsewhere. It is no matter to us.

Manny stood there, his hand in the sync, stunned. He had listened to Jerry for so long, heard so much from so many people that he lived around, that everything had become an echo chamber. They would win. They would defeat The Genesis. There was no other way. And here he was, talking to, if not The Genesis then its emissary, and it laughed at him. Treated him, treated the whole movement like little more than a joke. No. No more than a joke. That’s what Manny was, standing here, his hand in this sync—a big joke. What had he thought? That his rag-tag group of people out in the desert would mount something against this intelligence? Would somehow make a difference? Had Jerry actually convinced him of that?

Why so quiet, Manuel Lendoiro?

He blinked, tears coming to his eyes. He had come here to betray his movement in order to save it. And this thing, this being, said it didn’t matter at all what he did. He could report Caesar or move on, in the end, it wasn’t going to make a bit of difference.

He’s after an application we know as The Tourist. He most likely knows where it resides now. He’s going to try to find it and then find you. All of what he said happened only in his head, but even there his voice sounded lifeless.

Thank you, Manuel Lendoiro. We will meet him there. Is there anything else we can do for you? We can, if you’d like, send someone now to end your meaningless little life, or we can let you go ahead and finish living it out, if that’s what you prefer. What’ll it be?

Manny took his hand from the sync and walked away.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

Manny.

I should have killed him. I should have walked in that room and cut his throat while he lay next to his wife. I’m a coward, I suppose. Maybe that’s the real difference between Caesar and me. Not his intelligence. Not the things he’s done, both cruel and courageous. Just that I’m a coward and in the end that made all the difference.

I didn’t kill him, though. I let him live and walked back down that hallway. I decided I would talk to Caesar when he got back.

Jerry built Manny, made him second in command. Made him think that anything was possible, that the world would turn back, that The Genesis would fold, that The Named couldn’t fail. I guess, as I write this, I’m wondering whose fault is it that he did what he did? That he turned Caesar in? Some of the blame rests with him, surely, there’s no way around that, but is there more to go around? Probably. Jerry was an idiot in the way he brought Caesar in. So confident, so full of himself that he couldn’t be wrong about Caesar, but yet giving no one else any real reason to believe. What did he expect to happen? That Caesar would come in and The Eight would welcome him, would throw roses at his feet?

I’ll give it to Manny. He believed in what he did. Somehow, in his own head, his justifications added up. Caesar wasn’t the one they wanted, so he had to go, even if no one else saw it.

I’d like to ask Manny now what he thinks? I know what he believed back then, but what about now, after everything is nearly done? After Jerry’s game has played out, what does he think? I won’t get the chance, but…

I think he’d do the same.

Manny was smart, but not as smart as he believed. His problem was that he couldn’t see the long game, not nearly as long as Jerry and certainly not as long as The Genesis. Manny saw what was in front of him, he saw Caesar and he saw the little that Caesar brought to the table. He saw Jerry’s enthusiasm and it all terrified him. It all made him think that the end was near, that there would be no long game. He didn’t think about what came next. He showed up at that sync and put his hand in and only imagined he was saving The Eight. Saving the compound. Saving his wife and son.

His belief in his own intelligence caused all the disaster. His belief that if he wasn’t Jerry, he was the closest to him. That he could make decisions in the same manner, with the same execution, and get the same result. He thought that he could keep The Genesis out of his head, that he had the capabilities Caesar did. He didn’t. Manny was special when you looked at the rest of society, miles above everyone else, like a mountain over a lake, but The Genesis was the sun that shone above that mountain. Arrogance, I suppose, is what got everyone killed—Manny’s arrogance.

Now, if he were to answer the question about whether he still would have told, his response wouldn’t have anything to do with whether he was right in his actions. He wasn’t. His response would be based on what Caesar did after. Now, he would have the ability to look at the long game. Even though Manny killed a lot of people with what he did, killed them in an instant, he would still have to look at what the original dream had been and what Caesar delivered. Manny thought Caesar wasn’t the right one for the job, and he was both wrong and right. He didn’t deliver what Manny and Jerry wanted, but he did make it to The Genesis. He did what none of the rest could have. All of that came later, came after Manny’s decision.

A lot came after, really. In fact, everything came after. Up until that moment, up until Manny stuck his hand in that sync and told whatever was on the other side what Caesar wanted, all of it had been foreplay. Manny put the condom on.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Have you heard from Manny?” Caesar asked.

Jerry shook his head.

Caesar didn’t know, really, why he asked. It didn’t have anything to do with what came next. To take his mind off the moment, he supposed. Leon relayed to him everything Manny had said. Paige relayed the same to Jerry. Everyone inside The Eight understood; he thought Caesar was going to get them all killed, basically. That didn’t matter right now, though. At all. Manny wasn’t back and no one knew if he was coming back. His wife had been in hysterics and only calmed down over the last twenty-four hours or so.

Caesar had one last decision to make today and the decision was in front of him now.

“There’s no more time?” He asked.

Jerry shook his head.

He knew it was true. If he was going after The Tourist, the surgery had to happen. There wasn’t any way around it, and if he wasn’t going to do the surgery, then everything had been for nothing. His parents. His brother. All the time spent here. The council they blew up and the man he murdered. All of it just rain in the desert, doing nothing for no one.

“That thing,” he said, pointing to the chip lying on the table—the tiny sliver of metal. “You’ve looked into it, right? There’s nothing in it that’s going to mess me up? When I come out the other side, I’ll be mostly the same?”

“There’s nothing in there that isn’t in mine, but I’m not going to sit here and say you’ll be mostly the same. You know that.”

“I can’t do anything else,” he whispered. He didn’t know if Jerry heard and didn’t really care. It was to Grace and himself. “I’ve come this far, I can’t turn around.”

“There’s nothing for you if you do,” Grace answered. She wasn’t happy, wasn’t anywhere near happy about what he was about to do, but she couldn’t skirt the truth. “This is what you wanted. This is why you came. Right here.”

Bless her and murder her at the same time. She was right. That chip lying there and everything it meant, that’s why he was here. Standing here looking at it, talking about it, was just wasting time. He’d already wasted thirty-three years.

“Okay,” Caesar said. “Let’s get started.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

No one knew The Genesis was coming.

We knew Caesar was under the knife, knew that Jerry was down there performing the same surgery that had once been performed on him.

I was in the playground beneath the surface. I took some turns down there watching after the kids. It was really just a room with some makeshift equipment. Balls and things of that nature. I enjoyed the kids and, more than anything else, that’s why I went there—not so much the need to earn my keep. Those bastards brought me here and kept me here, so I figured they owed me a keep.

I remember worrying about Caesar.

The surgery was unlike anything I’d ever heard of. Jerry was going to place a chip in his brain, a piece of metal that supposedly would do quite a few things. One, it’d allow him more access to his brain tissue. Two, it’d allow him to transform other pieces of his body, to make himself into a machine, which everyone said would be important when the battles started. I didn’t know back then, and I didn’t really care. I wanted him to make it out because if he didn’t, what did I have left? I wanted him to make it out because I loved him.

So I was watching the kids and thinking about Caesar when it came, or sent something in its place—I don’t know which. Manny sent it, even if he didn’t know. Hell, it was a while before we knew he did it. Manny sent it when he synced. He wasn’t Caesar; that’s what he didn’t understand. Caesar could keep the sync out of his head but Manny wasn’t able to. It found out where we were and sent them, death that the world hadn’t seen before. An application that was meant, at least we thought at the time, to kill us all. Now I know that wasn’t the truth, but then? How could we have thought any differently?

Plaster fell from the roof, shaking down like tiny snowflakes. The entire room shook, and the only thing I thought was earthquake. The cities were strategically built off fault lines, so I’d never experienced something even resembling an earthquake, but I didn’t know what else was possible. The kids started crying, grabbing onto each other and pieces of playground equipment, trying to balance themselves. Some fell down, unable to hold on.

I picked up two of the smallest, putting one in each arm, and then screamed for everyone to—

“Get in the hall! Come on, in the hall!”

We rushed out, only wanting to get to the surface. Under here, if everything collapsed, we were all dead. Get them to the surface, that’s all I thought. I didn’t know. I couldn’t have.

The walls shook and the plaster kept floating down, but I drove upward, trying to get to the sunlight, hoping that standing out there on the sand would be better than standing down here underneath the thousands of pounds of concrete.

We made it to the top, pushing forward with the rest of the crowd. Parents were grabbing their kids and running outside, all of us certain that safety waited. That danger rested inside.

The sun blinded me at first, casting down its brightness across all of us. I brought my hand to shield my eyes, to try to see what was out here because something wasn’t right. The ground still shook, but the noises, what were those? Earthquakes didn’t sound like that. Earthquakes didn’t sound like crackling flames.

And then I saw it.

Fire burning in the air. Not flames attached to anything, but flames that burnt on nothing but oxygen, flames that moved through the air particles the same as any application. I don’t know where it started; I wasn’t out there in time to see it. I understood immediately, though, why the plaster fell from the ceilings beneath the ground, why the walls shook. The pressure. The flames were everywhere, burning on invisible straw, but not on the ground. The flames stretched up a mile into the sky, bright orange and blue licking at the air, all of the air, everywhere. I couldn’t see anything else. Just the fire, like it had rained down from the sky, and I imagine that’s exactly where it came from. Some application dispersed a mile into the air, and when the fire started, it caught and spread down and out.

It was moving closer to the compound. Moving fast, like fire from a blowtorch, except the torch was the sky itself.

I turned around and looked at the doors to the compound, open with people streaming out, thinking safety would be found outside. We had to get back in, all of us, and immediately. Because in a few more seconds we would be little more than charred pieces of dying flesh. The fire was coming from all directions and no water would put this out. No water would douse it or save us.

“GET BACK IN! BACK INSIDE!” I screamed.

But people only stopped and stared, caught in the beauty of what burned before them, caught in the fear of what it meant. Only a few turned, like me, looking at the door and most likely wondering if there was any chance that they would make it back inside before they burnt alive. I started running, no one in my arms now because the parents had claimed their children. Running for safety, running to be inside the walls that might have a chance of protecting me from the inferno sweeping down.

The heat fell across me like a sandstorm, almost blinding me from the intensity of it, my skin feeling it from everywhere, unable to escape. I didn’t have to turn around to see the fire, all I had to do was look in front of me. It came from everywhere. From all places. Surrounding the entire compound.

I glimpsed what it came from, for only a second. Tiny red particles, like seeds almost but smaller and looking spongy. Right before each one exploded into flames, they birthed two more of the same particle, thus intensifying the flames while making sure it spread at an ever increasing rate.

People were in my way and at first I tried to drag them with me, screaming at them to come on, to get out of the way, to “STOP GODDAMN STARING AND MOVE!” Some listened and started running in front of me. Most didn’t. And then I did the only other thing I could, I pushed those that wouldn’t move out of my way.

Now, looking back, it was all I could do—but that’s the logical, detached part of my mind describing it. I was also sentencing people to death so that I could find life. I threw them from me, my legs continually pumping forward, continually trying to get to those doors as the heat bared down.

I made it and I didn’t stop there. I kept running. Deeper and deeper into the compound, the fire sweeping over everyone behind me as I moved forward. Windows burst in all around me, the heat from the fires finally reaching them and shattering every piece of glass it found. Still, I ran. The fire lept in through the windows, and whoever wasn’t already inside, The Genesis bless them because nothing else would.

I made it back downstairs, hiding in one of the rooms. A windowless room. I didn’t hear any screams down here. I felt the rumblings though, the shaking as the fire rolled through the first level, burning everything it touched, killing everyone I knew.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jerry stepped out of the compound.

The sand beneath his feet crunched just as normal, unchanging no matter what happened to it.

Nothing else in front of him could say the same.

He looked out on his home, on the land that he found and made his own. On the land he had brought The Eight to, brought them here because it was so desolate, so remote, so unknown that they would never be found. They could grow here. They could assemble. They could build and when the time came they could attack. This place allowed them that opportunity, or rather, it was supposed to.

Jerry’s world lay in ashes before him.

And when not ashes, then grotesque, burnt beings.

Blackened bodies lay everywhere; the smell of spoiling meat assaulting his senses. He doubled over as he realized those were his friends, his people, lying out here in the sand, their bodies turning rancid under the afternoon heat. The fire killed them, then disappeared, and now the heat would finish destroying their carcasses. Jerry’s vision blurred and he felt saliva building in his mouth, signaling that vomit would come next. He closed his eyes and focused on holding his stomach together, on keeping everything inside, on not puking out here in the sand.

He heard others coming outside after him; survivors coming to see what he had come to see. The fire over, to see their group broken. Burnt. Dead.

There were things to do, he knew. The Genesis would send more and quickly. He might already be too late. This was the first attack, the first wave to take out as many people as it could in one sweep, but more applications would come. More that would pick off the stragglers, more that would finish off the wounded. By the end of today The Named would be no more; that was The Genesis’ goal.

Jerry straightened up, not completely confident his stomach would hold, but needing to look and then move. Needing to see this first, to see what his people had become, to see what The Genesis did to them, and then to move. To get out of here. To take anyone who still lived and find them somewhere else to live.

Christ, where would they find that? In this place? In this desert?

The dead lay everywhere. Their bodies lying down like they had decided to take a nap right under the desert sun, except before napping they had lay across a grill and allowed flames to lick at them until their skin was little more than charcoal. He walked by the bodies, seeing pink tongues lolling out of mouths, the only pink visible on most people. Eyes remained open but only because the fire had burnt off their eyelids, discarding those tiny flaps of skin as if they were paper.

Jerry listened as people vomited behind him, unable to take the smell or the sight or the combination.

Fine.

This is where he was now. The leader of a dying group, with children and mothers lying before him, their bodies unrecognizable. He couldn’t dwell on this. He couldn’t stand here and stare anymore or the rest of his group would die next. Caesar too. Caesar was what mattered here, when he took out all the emotion and fear. Caesar, down there still trying to recover from surgery, and quite possibly not going to make it.

He had to make it. Everyone else in The Named could burn out here and then rot under the sun, but Caesar had to make it.

Jerry turned around and looked at those crying. A few people had cast themselves on the dead bodies, loved ones that Jerry didn’t have the time to make out right now. He saw Paige standing at the door, not having stepped far out into the sand, looking at him with tears streaming down her face.

No one else would move them right now. No one else would take care of The Named. Jerry had to.

*

“Will it find us here?” Keke asked.

The Eight now reduced to four, five if Manny could ever be found and six if someone counted Caesar. But the original? The people that Paige grew to love and care about? Only four of them were here. Her, Keke, Jerry, and Tim.

“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I don’t think so, but I can’t know for sure.”

A day had passed since their world exploded. No one knew what had become of the bodies of their loved ones, whether vultures were picking at their bones or The Genesis came in some other fashion, looking for survivors. Jerry swept everyone living out of there like a broom across dust, moving them fast and without real care of who was tossed in the process. They had to move, and people could sob as they did, but their feet best keep moving. Most made it out. Some refused. Some hugged those rotting bodies, dealing with the smell and nausea and pus seeping from wounds, saying they wouldn’t leave. Saying they couldn’t leave. So Jerry had left them and Paige still saw their faces. Shock. Terror. Their faith destroyed.

He didn’t have a choice, she thought as she looked across the other three people in this room. He had to do it and you know that. If he waited, even for one person, you wouldn’t be standing here right now.

She knew it to be true, understood it logically, but couldn’t get the eyes of those people left behind out of her head.

“And Caesar?” Tim asked. “Is he going to make it?”

Jerry looked at his feet. Had she ever seen him cast his eyes down like that? Not avoiding the question but his confidence so clearly shaken that he didn’t know what to do with himself. His confidence, his certainty in himself, in their mission, that was what kept them all going. That had changed the original Eight from their wish of perpetual hiding. And here he was, now, casting his eyes to the ground at a question.

“He’s resting. I thought the surgery was finished when we left, but it wasn’t. His brain isn’t taking to the chip like it needs to. He’s rejecting it, thinking of it as some kind of foreign body rather than bringing it in. In the next hour, I’m going to try again, and we’ll see. That’s all I can do.”

“What if he dies?” Tim again, and Paige could tell his own faith was shaken. This had been Jerry’s movement, despite Jerry’s belief in Caesar, and now his captains were all looking for someone else, looking for something to believe in.

“He’ll make it,” Paige said. “He’s going to be fine.”

Paige couldn’t know if that was true, but she only knew that’s what people needed to hear right now.

When she left the room, she made sure not to show anyone her back. She could feel the blood causing her shirt to stick to her skin, knew that her wound was getting worse. This wasn’t the time, though. Caesar had to pull through first.

*

The wreckage was all consuming. Manny couldn’t pull away and couldn’t bear to look either. Not at first. His eyes wouldn’t close and yet he fell to the ground, sobbing. This was him. All of it. The people here weren’t breathing because of what he’d done in the city. Because he synced. Because he talked to The Genesis.

That was the only possibly.

The dead were everywhere. The majority burnt, but not all of them. Some lay prostate across others, holes in their head, drilled clear through by some kind of weapon, but the rest of their body unharmed. Those people were the second pass-through. The ones that the fire didn’t get.

He stared at it for a few minutes, crying and screaming and pounding his fist against his legs, looking like a child unable to get a toy that he desperately wanted. And then a deeper realization came over, one that moved past the shock, past the knowledge that he had somehow contributed to this, that these people’s deaths rested on him. The realization that moved through this paralyzing state was that his wife and son lived in this compound too. That it wasn’t just himself or his friends. It wasn’t just The Named and The Eight. Brandi and Dustin had lived here too and he left them when he went to the city. Left them alone. Left them for this.

He started running, searching bodies, looking for anyone resembling his wife. The eyes of most people he looked at were open, but charred over, revealing nothing of the colors that could help identify them. He checked children and adults the same, but hair was missing, and outside of sex organs, there wasn’t anything to help him know.

Where was his son? Where was his wife? Were they here amongst the dead, where the birds feasted like perhaps never before? Or had they made it out?

Oh, Dear Heaven, let them have made it out.

*

Manny sat in the sun for an hour, his ass in the sand, looking at the dead. Sweat poured off him like tiny rivers searching for the ocean. He had looked through everyone twice and couldn’t find Brandi or Dustin. Couldn’t know for sure if his wife lay out here with the rest of the dead. It took his brain a while to make the conclusion that people might be inside, that perhaps survivors waited in there. The fact that he had already identified a second group of killings in that some of the dead weren’t burned, but simply killed by a hole in their head, fell through this logic; his own raging emotions kept him from seeing it.

He searched the compound. Room by room. He found a few more dead people, all of them with holes the size of a dime going straight through their head. He could see completely through in some cases, looking at the floor beneath them. Manny didn’t find his wife inside, though; he didn’t find his child.

Jerry wasn’t here either, that he was sure of. If Jerry’s flesh burnt off, if he died here, then there would be some kind of metal skeleton littering this place, but there wasn’t. Jerry had left, and while the death count was high, it wasn’t everyone. Nearly one hundred and fifty people lived in this compound, and there weren’t that many lying about. They had left. There were survivors and if his wife and child weren’t here, then they were with Jerry, wherever he had gone.

Manny found a chair and sat down. A small one, finding himself sitting in the room they used for the children’s school. He sat and he thought.

Where could Jerry have gone? Where would he have taken everyone?

He knew how to find out, but he knew never to do it either. All of The Eight knew. They were the only ones though, because activating it could get Jerry killed. Did Manny want to risk that? Were the surroundings not enough for him? Had he not had his fill on murder?

Brandi and Dustin. They were what mattered right now. Not Jerry. Not The Named. Only those two, and if he had to activate the chip in Jerry’s head to know what happened to them, then he would. Dialing in created an alert to anything listening, it let the airwaves know something was active, something that wasn’t human, something that The Genesis created. The same signal an application would give if it were to come into a given area. If Jerry wasn’t safe, if he was anywhere that could be monitored, then alarms could ring all the way up to The Genesis, and he would die moments after hearing Manny’s voice.

What other choice did he have though?

He found the equipment, undisturbed by whatever came through this place. The applications hadn’t been looking for equipment, only for people to kill. He found it and lay it out on the table, a rectangular looking box, with buttons and lights on it. An antenna stood up in the right corner. Had anyone ever used this? None of the current Eight, for sure. If someone had, it was long ago, before anyone alive right now ever knew of Jerry. If it didn’t work, Manny was out of luck. If it didn’t work, Manny would live here with the dead, wondering about his wife and child until he decided to put a knife inside himself.

Manny pressed a button next to the antennae and the box lit up, not making a sound. Jerry showed him this a long time ago, showed him the same as he had showed the rest of The Eight.

In case you need me. But only when there’s no other choice. When you use this, you put me at a risk greater than any other way you possibly can. You have complete control over my life.

A risk greater than any other you possibly can. Jerry hadn’t known what he was talking about, it seemed. Manny had put him at a much greater risk today, put them all at a much greater risk.

He pressed the buttons, going through the ritual that he memorized all those years ago.

“Who’s here?” The voice that came from the box was mechanical, showing none of the emotions that Jerry’s voice normally carried. It was him though. His thoughts relaying through this machine.

“It’s me, Manny.” Manny’s voice broke on the last word, cracking as surprisingly as a whip.

Silence came through the machine. Manny understood he was inside Jerry’s head, that it wasn’t just his voice he heard, but Jerry’s thoughts as well, if Jerry let him. He wasn’t now, though. His mind was still, perfectly still, and Manny knew why. Jerry didn’t want him to know anything he thought, because Jerry believed he might have had something to do with the compound, with the dead people upstairs. With the dead in the rooms around him.

“What happened?” Manny asked, tears in his eyes and surely about to fall down onto his cheeks. “What happened here?”

Slowly, with precision, metering out each word, Jerry said, “Where were you, Manny?”

In his confusion, his sorrow, his goddamn panic, he’d forgotten his story. He had one, when he showed up here, was ready to tell Jerry and The Eight and whoever else wanted to hear. What was it? What was he going to tell them? He didn’t have time now to stumble, to give anything but…

“I went to the city. The one Caesar was born in, Allencine.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to see where he came from. I wanted to see if it was similar to where I came from.”

Silence on the other end again. A longer silence, without a single thought or word coming through the machine.

“Tell me, Jerry, what happened here? Where’s Brandi? Where’s my son?”

“They didn’t make it.”

A robot read the thought out to him, a robot that couldn’t possibly understand what it was saying or what it meant to the person it spoke too. Electrons firing off metal, creating sounds that relayed Jerry’s words.

They didn’t make it.

“What’s that mean, Jerry? What’s that fucking mean?” Manny asked, anger and panic rising inside like lava in a volcano, no amount of rock or Earth able to hold it back.

“They’re dead. The Genesis killed them like everyone else.”

“No,” he said simply. Refusing to believe it. Refusing it to be true. Refusing the whole goddamn thing.

“Do you want to come to us?” Jerry asked.

Do you want to come to us? To fucking who, Jerry? You and Caesar? Paige and the rest of them? Come to your new hide out? Come and do what? WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO, JERRY? The thoughts raged inside him, a bear trying to get to its cubs, but Manny had no more cubs. Had no more spouse. Had a compound full of dead people and a robot on the line who was asking if Manny wanted to come to them. What kind of a fucking question was that? Was he supposed to sit here, go cook some eggs, sleep in his bed tonight? Was that what the fuck he was supposed to do?

And then a calmer thought came, one closer to the reptilian part of his brain. One that discarded the emotions that were just about to take over completely. A thought that had to get a single phrase in before everything collapsed. He knows. Jerry knows and that’s why he’s asking rather than telling you where they are.

And then the rest of Manny shut the voice up and he sobbed. He sobbed and sobbed, not bothering to shut the machine off in front of him. He cried inside Jerry’s head, unable to hold back the pain any longer.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Don’t move,” Grace said. “Stay still.”

She whispered it into Caesar’s ear and he heard her immediately. No lag time from waking to knowing exactly what she meant. The transmission from her voice to the neurons inside his head happened instantaneously.

Why? He asked, except his voice didn’t come from his mouth. It appeared inside his head, as if he had wanted to speak it but somewhere in the midst of communicating with his mouth, the words got lost.

“You’re not ready to move yet. Soon, but not yet.”

How did you…but the voice in his head trailed off as he realized he was doing it again, that he wasn’t communicating with his mouth, but through some other way, communicating and being understood.

“It’s the chip. It’s inside you, Caesar, and it’s making decisions. I…” She paused, sounding unsure of herself. “I didn’t know they were this advanced. The application that brought this to you…she…” But Grace didn’t finish. It was like she was lost for the first time, not knowing how to end her sentence, not knowing exactly what she wanted to say.

What decisions? Caesar asked.

“You’re connected to me and Jerry. You can access us whenever you want and the chip knows this. It knows the quickest way to communicate, the most direct. It’s trying to save you time right now. That’s why when you speak, the words aren’t leaving your head. It knows that all you have to do is think at me.”

Caesar opened his eyes and looked down but only saw sheets covering his body.

Can Jerry hear this?

“No. You’re talking to me. The chip knows. It automatically knows who you’re addressing and does the necessary work.”

Caesar’s eyes moved around the rest of the room, taking in his surroundings. He lay on a cot of sorts, near the floor, but his arms and legs were restrained by something, he couldn’t see it without removing the sheets.

Grab the belts.

The words came to him from nowhere, and yet he knew who had spoken them. Jerry, at some time in the past. The sound of belts rustling and then being tied to his hands and feet came to him next; he could almost feel it happening.

How do I know there are belts tying me down? He asked.

“The chip doesn’t turn off. Your mind will. It’ll sleep and you’ll sleep, but the chip is always listening, recording. It’s endless.”

How long ago did it take? But before Grace could answer he knew: fifteen hours.

“There’s a lot you won’t have to ask anyone, ever again, Caesar.”

Why do you sound so frightened? He asked.

“I had an idea of what it would do, but not this. This wasn’t possible, at least not that I knew about. Certainly Jerry didn’t. Jerry’s mind is powerful, but his chip is like the first wheel when compared with yours. A breakthrough for the human race, but something that doesn’t work anymore, that is less than useless. You’re…you’re the closet any human has ever come to achieving The Genesis.”

What else? That wasn’t all and he knew it. The tone in her voice relayed emotions at a much deeper level than he had understood before. His mind was coming up with calculations, calculations he didn’t really even understand, that would take time to dive into, but he understood the conclusion: Grace was holding something from him.

“You know. I can tell you, but you know.”

And so he did. There wasn’t anything Grace could hide from him. She told him not to move because his bones hadn’t grafted to the metal yet. His muscles in all the major parts of his body had been replaced, ripped out and filled with something much harder, much stronger.

“We didn’t think you were going to make it, Caesar. A lot…a lot’s happened and we thought your brain was going to reject the implant and you would end up stroking out. Jerry decided to do all of it. The whole transformation instead of just the chip. If you were going to make it, then he didn’t want to have to put you under again. It’ll take some time, but your body is adjusting to the material inside it. The chip is wiring all of it together, constantly, but building it out isn’t…”

Instantaneous, Caesar thought. Seventy-eight hours, four minutes, and twenty seven seconds left. He wouldn’t be able to function fully until then. His arms would move before that, of course, because the chip wired them first given their proximity to it. What else happened? He asked, his mind moving on from the time to fix himself. He couldn’t answer the next question, and he imagined it was because the chip hadn’t been turned on at that point.

“The Genesis attacked. It found The Named’s location and killed over half of them. Of us, I guess. We’re not at the compound; we’re in a cave, one that Jerry mapped out a long time ago.”

Caesar didn’t say anything back. Half of The Named dead. He didn’t ask about Leon because he knew his friend still lived, the chip relaying a voice clip of Leon looking at him lying on this cot. Paige either. Four of The Eight still lived, all of them having come into this part of the cavern at some point, to look at him. That was it though, he didn’t know about anyone else because there had been no other voices to record.

Where’s Jerry?

“Call to him. He’ll come.”

*

Caesar called the meeting four days after he woke up.

Everyone sat on the ground. There wasn’t anything else for them to sit on. Jerry had found this place but he hadn’t outfitted it. He hadn’t let anyone know it even existed, having visited it once and then never again. It was extensive, the caverns, and so far they hadn’t found any large animals—only small ones such as snakes and vermin. The further they pushed back, it looked like everyone would have enough living space. The comforts though, that was a large step down. No more kitchen. No more indoor plumbing. No more cooking on a stove. Hunting had begun, first in the cave, and then at night to the surrounding desert. When they were able to kill coyotes, that was a good night, but everyone in this room, the remainder of The Eight knew that wouldn’t last. That eventually, introducing this many humans into the ecosystem would destroy it, and their food supply would be depleted soon.

Jerry sat next to Caesar and Manny next to Jerry. There were seven of them here, the five from the original Eight plus Leon and Caesar. The Eight were no more. Would never be again, as far as Caesar cared. Its purpose had been served and The Genesis ended it with a speed none of them thought possible.

Caesar spent the past four days discovering himself, understanding what this new body was. Limitless. That’s the only way he could think of it. The chip in his mind calculated instantaneously what he could and couldn’t do, of course, but compared to his previous body, this one was unstoppable. The weak points were his bones. The metal that moved them could propel him at such a force that if he collided with something hard, his bones would turn to dust. He thought he had figured a way around that, though, but he needed time to implement it. They didn’t have time right now. They had the location of The Tourist and it was time to move.

Caesar didn’t understand The Genesis any better now than he had before; perhaps it was the only thing in this world that remained similar to his life before the surgery. It had moved against The Named though, for the first time in history. In one afternoon it reduced their number by over half. The brainpower, the ones that had directed the group for the past twenty years, were now half. Caesar brought the chip to the table, plus his innate intelligence, but he couldn’t bring that experience and he understood the limitation. The Genesis tried to annihilate them, and nearly did. Now, it was their turn to move. To attack.

He looked around the room at the faces in front of him. Their eyes didn’t fall on Jerry any longer, but on Caesar. The change had been made quickly and without any push back. Naturally. This was his circle now, these seven people, and they would go to the rest of The Named and make what he said so. No longer a council, this had turned into a dictatorship with himself at the helm.

It was a rational decision, not made with any emotion. All of these men and women were geniuses, but all of them still human. The irony of his demand—that they obey him in order to kill that which controlled the human race—wasn’t lost on him, but it was still necessary. After this was done, his control would end, but it couldn’t until then.

What he didn’t know, what bothered him even now but which mainly remained unspoken, was how The Genesis did it. Manny, most likely, but Caesar wouldn’t kill him on a most likely bid. Jerry and he discussed it in depth, but what did they have? He left and when he returned everyone was dead? Including his son and wife? That’s where the doubt lay. It didn’t make sense, that theory, because everyone that saw Manny understood he was feeling an immense amount of pain. If he somehow turned in The Named, then why was he back? Why was he still alive? And was Caesar, or Jerry, just to kill him based on a possibility?

No. Caesar knew he couldn’t. Not without reason, without certainty. Pierre died because there was no other choice; Caesar understood that now. Caesar missed the person he was a year ago but Jerry had been right in pushing, in coaxing. This, though—there was no certainty here, not yet.

And so, here they were, and he was ready to speak. He knew what must be done and knew the time had come to do it. He was telling them all, the rest of the decapitated Eight, and they would know at the end of this if Manny was the leak. The problem was, they didn’t have time to plant a false leak. What he told today would be the truth. They couldn’t stay in this hole forever, couldn’t trust that The Genesis didn’t already have applications scanning the entire area, looking for them. If Manny leaked, then Caesar would have to figure that out when the time came.

“I’m going to get The Tourist,” he said. He looked at his shoes, folded up underneath his legs. “I’ll leave in two days and I should be in its city three days after that. I’m going alone. We’ll find out The Genesis’ home and then we’ll go there next.” He looked up. “Any questions about it?”

“I know why you can’t bring Jerry, but why not one of us? Anyone will be better than no one,” Tim said from across the circle.

Caesar shook his head. “If something happens, you’ll only die. I can’t look after myself and someone else at the same time, not effectively. If I go alone, I have the highest chance of success. If I bring someone else, I’m just putting them in danger.”

Paige looked to Jerry. “You’re okay with this? He’s ready?”

Caesar didn’t say anything, didn’t look at Jerry, but kept his eyes on Paige. She was the only one that would ask such a question, the only one that still looked to Jerry for guidance. The rest were lost right now, swimming in a sea full of dead bodies and trying not to bump into them. Manny? Manny might not make it out of this with his sanity. Paige though, she still wanted Jerry’s opinion. Still wanted to hear it from him.

Jerry nodded. “He speaks for me. Whether or not he’s ready, Paige, we don’t have any more time. I found this place and that means The Genesis can too. Probably fairly easy. If it sets off fire here, there’s nowhere to hide. It will eat through this entire cave and kill everyone. He has to get The Tourist and we have to find somewhere else to live. I’ve begun looking, but if the strike on the compound taught us anything, it’s that we’re out of time.”

Paige looked away from Jerry and to Caesar. She opened her mouth to speak again, but Jerry interrupted.

“The Genesis knows. That’s why it did what it did. It knows about the chip it lost and knows we have Caesar. However it found us, it attacked because it knows we’re coming. It knows he’s coming and it’s scared. He’s ready, Paige.”

*

They were all so goddamn stupid it was laughable, really. Manny could have laughed and laughed and laughed at them until tears streamed down his eyes and splashed on the floor, until those same tears flooded the entire cave.

Caesar was ready?

What a fucking joke.

Caesar put a little bit of metal in his body and suddenly thought he was ready to take on The Singularity? The Genesis? He was a child and didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Jerry? Jerry was either insane or working for The Singularity, those were the only two options as Manny saw it. Manny knew. He knew what was going to happen to that group, knew what was going to happen to all of The Named. The same thing that happened to his wife. They were going to die face down in the sand, with their bodies charred beyond recognition. Not a single one of them, from Jerry down to Keke, would have a fucking say in anything that happened. The Genesis controlled all.

That’s what Manny knew now, what none of them had a clue about.

Except maybe Jerry. Manny hadn’t figured that out yet. The old man had tricked Manny for a long time, years on end. No more though. The Genesis had laughed inside Manny’s head, told him that they were no threat, and then shown up at the compound and killed half of them in less than five minutes. The only thing Manny didn’t really understand was why it didn’t just kill them all? It could have, easily. Maybe it was playing with them, just a cat pawing at a mouse. It didn’t matter though; everyone was already as dead as Brandi and Dustin. Either Jerry knew that and was leading them to their death or Jerry had lost his goddamn mind over the past thousand years. Either way, Manny didn’t care.

Manny was done with him. He was done with all of it.

Of course, he hadn’t told any of them that, because he didn’t know what his own plans were just yet. The past few days felt like living in a fog so dense that he couldn’t see his own hand if he held it six inches from his face. He was blind, only able to think about Brandi, to think about the smiles that his son had just started making. His son had dreamed—even at a few months old, his son was able to dream, and Dustin smiled at whatever he saw in those dreams, smiled and Manny had looked down at him in awe. No more. No more having his wife wrap her arms around him and kiss his lips. No more any of that because they were both dead. Their bodies were probably just about skeletons at this point, maybe even less than that if the coyotes ripped apart their bones when fighting over the scraps. Brandi was now coyote excrement.

And that.

Wasn’t.

Acceptable.

Caesar still lived. If anything, Caesar had grown in power, now dictating what happened to The Eight.

There is no more Eight, Manny. Remember, you got them all killed.

Fine. Fine. Fine. No more Eight, but Caesar still dictated to those that remained. This false prophet. This impostor. How many years had they all searched for someone to lead them against The Genesis and this is what they found? Jerry had to be in on it. He had to have infiltrated the entire Named in order to set this up so that Caesar would lead them straight to destruction. It didn’t matter. Not really. Manny was fine with all of them dying now. He just wanted one thing. He wanted to watch Caesar die. He didn’t care when and he didn’t care how, but he wanted to see it. Caesar was the real reason Manny’s wife and son were dead. If Caesar hadn’t been here, then there would have been no reason for Manny to leave in the first place, to go out and search for The Genesis.

How could he watch Caesar die? That was the question that plagued Manny now. How could he be there when The Genesis finally stopped this man’s heart from beating?

Chapter Twenty-Seven

She sat on his makeshift bed when he turned the corner to his small hole in this cave.

He stopped, not moving forward anymore, but just looking down at Paige.

“Hey,” she said and a swarm of butterflies suddenly found their way into Caesar’s stomach.

“Hey,” he said back.

“You didn’t lock your door.” Paige smiled.

“The locks haven’t been working as of late,” Caesar answered.

They looked at each other, neither saying anything. Why was she here? Why had she chosen his small cot to sit on? Why hadn’t she stood?

“You really think this is the best way?” She asked finally.

“It’s the only way. There’s nothing else we can do. We can’t wait here and even if we find somewhere else quickly, someone leaked our information. Someone will leak it again. It couldn’t have found us any other way. The odds are just too small.”

“You know all of the odds now, don’t you?” She didn’t look to the scar on the side of his head, where the hair had not covered it completely yet.

“Most of them,” he said.

“Do you think you’re ready?”

The same question she had asked Jerry, but now she was asking him. No one else at that pow-wow had asked it. They either accepted his readiness or accepted that Jerry said he was ready, but none questioned him. Fear or awe or simple shock of the past couple weeks, but at least one of those reasons kept them from saying anything to him about it. Jerry hadn’t asked either, not before the meeting or during it. And really, Caesar hadn’t asked himself. He knew he had to go now and that meant it didn’t matter if he was ready. It didn’t matter if he wanted to. He was here and the only one able to do it, so he had to go.

“Does it matter if I am?” He asked.

Paige’s smile returned, but it was a sad one. “I like to think it does.”

“What does it mean, then, to be ready?”

“A couple of things I guess. Are you capable enough to do what is needed when you get there? Do you understand the plan well enough to succeed? And, are you mentally prepared to die, if you don’t succeed?” She didn’t smile as she finished.

“I’m ready to die,” he said.

“And the rest?”

Dying was easy. Dying was what he’d wanted to do since Jerry found him in his parents’ apartment, preparing to throw himself from their sky-rise window, before that even—when Paige first found him ready to step out in front of a train. He didn’t have a problem with that at all, in fact, a large part of him still wanted it. He had a chip in his head and metal for muscles, but so what? What else did he have? Leon? A group of people cowed by an experience that made them almost as complacent as the sheep they were supposed to liberate? A cave and a group of people mourning for their lost? He had nothing. A purpose, that was it. The purpose of trying to kill that which killed him, killed the parts of him that mattered. Killed the parts of him that would have allowed Gary Pierre to live.

And the rest?

“I don’t know. How can I?”

“You’ve seen Jerry move, I suppose. He’s survived a long time. Can you do what he does?”

Caesar smiled, not cockily, but in the same sad fashion Paige had. “Jerry moves slow compared to me, but that’s not what you’re really meaning in those questions is it?”

“No,” she shook her head. “Do you know what you’re doing, is what I mean?”

“No,” he said. He didn’t have any clue as to what he was doing. He had a brain now that could calculate the weather six days out and muscles that moved him with a strength he was just beginning to understand, but none of that meant he was ready. None of it meant he had the slightest idea about what he was doing when he left this place. He knew where to go, and he thought he knew what to do if he found The Tourist, but nothing else. Nothing about what waited for him. Nothing about how to proceed when he finished.

“Then why are you going?” Paige asked.

“Who else is there? What other choice do I have?” For some reason he felt tears at the corner of his eyes. He didn’t know they were coming, and didn’t understand why they were there, haunting him like a ghost. “I’m all there is. Jerry can’t go. You can’t go. I’m the only person who has a chance of surviving.”

“It scares you?” She could see the tears, had to be able to see them.

“Because I’ll probably fail. Someone’s leaking and if they leak this, then that’s the end of it all. If I fail, everyone in here dies, and I can’t even tell you all of their names, Paige. I’m going to get people killed that I don’t even know.”

Paige stood up from the bed and walked over to him, standing closer than she had in months. “So what?”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t move at all.

“We all die and so what? What’s changed? The sun comes up and it goes down and The Genesis lives on. You try and that’s all you can do. The outcome…it doesn’t matter. Not to me. You’re going out there while the rest of us sit here and wait. You’re doing something that all of us had the option to do, almost every single one of us was presented with putting a chip in our heads and we all said no. You’ve gone further than any human ever, already. So stop worrying about it. If even the smartest in humanity won’t save themselves, then don’t put that on your shoulders.”

This was the woman he had met all those months ago. This was the woman that he had sat and had a drink with in a bar. This was the woman that he died for, to make her happy.

For a little while, Caesar stopped thinking. About The Genesis. About Pierre. About Jerry.

He leaned in and kissed her and the rest of the world disappeared.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

I suppose I need to dedicate a chapter of this book to writing about what Caesar became. I don’t mean in the end, that’s a whole different subject that we’ll get to soon enough. I mean after the chip. After the computer was inserted into his brain.

I remember looking at him lying on the operating table, his head open, a scalpel in Jerry’s hand as if this was some kind of twenty-first century hospital. A lot of blood surrounded him but none of us worried about that. Jerry said it was normal, and I didn’t know whether or not it was, so I just believed him. I worried about what Jerry said I should worry about and that was whether Caesar’s brain would take the chip.

“Have you ever done this before?” I asked.

Jerry looked up at me as if I was a bug not worth being stepped on. No one else in the room asked. I don’t know if anyone else had even thought to ask. It seemed like an obvious question to me.

“No.” And that was it. He went back to looking at the brain before him. It’s a weird sight, your friend’s face looking somewhat normal and then watching the top of his head peeling back.

Jerry knew what he was doing and yet he didn’t. How could he, if he had never done it before? He knew theoretically, and I suppose, for someone like Jerry, that’s all you need. It worked. Caesar’s brain took it, the chip wiring infinitely small metal synapses into the tissue surrounding it. And then, a few days later, the man that woke up was different than the one that had gone to sleep.

It’s hard to explain the changes, all of them, and I’m not just talking about the chip. The man I knew a year before that chip laughed and joked and tried to get laid. He was a pleasure to be around. He made my life happier, he and my wife. And in the next year the happiness in Caesar died. Not all at once, but slowly, like someone bleeding it out of him. True, a lot left at once when he watched his parents melt, but it was draining before that too. And it continued to drain after. It’s still continuing to drain, I think, although he’s almost empty. He doesn’t have much happiness left to give.

When he woke up, I think he understood that better than when he went under. The chip allowed him a lot of cognitive functions that none of us will ever possess, that even Jerry doesn’t possess. I’ve watched him have whole conversations with Jerry without ever opening his mouth. I’ve seen him kill things that should have been unkillable, things that should have lived forever—they died at his hands. The chip, as well as the other surgeries, made all of that possible. But that was only part of what changed when he woke up. Before, I think he held some hope. Not a lot, but something. A part of him that thought when he killed The Genesis, he would have some satisfaction, that when he destroyed it and avenged his parents, he might find some of that lost happiness. Maybe even some forgiveness for what he did to the autistic. When he woke up from under the knife, I think that hope was missing. I don’t know if it was the chip that made him see things differently, or if it was waking up to find out over half the group you were supposed to lead had burned alive, but that hope of happiness left.

Caesar awoke determined but hopeless in that he might find happiness somewhere.

He wouldn’t find it in The Genesis’ death, nor in his own. The determination was from somewhere else, some other piece of him. Not the chip. That increased his capabilities, but didn’t change his values. I know he killed Pierre before the chip, but after, he would have killed me if I stood in his way. The only people that could have tried to stop him and not end up murdered were already dead. His parents. Cato. The rest of us…

Did he care for us?

I can’t say no to that. That wouldn’t be fair to him. He cared. He still cares, even now. Hell, he fell in love with Paige again, and no one can deny that. No, Caesar cared deeply for those around him, only, he cared more about killing The Genesis than he did us. Everyone could be sacrificed for that. And he did it without any hope of finding happiness in the end. I don’t understand that and I’ve thought for a long time about it. How does one kill those he loves for a goal that he knows will bring him no real satisfaction?

That’s what I want you to understand here. That when Caesar woke up, The Genesis was going to meet him one way or the other. The Genesis would meet him and The Genesis would at least have to deal with a threat to its extinction. Caesar saw no other way to live his life after the chip was put in; he saw no other purpose to living at all. Not Paige. Not myself. Not Jerry. Not Grace. We were important but peripheral. When he opened his eyes after the surgery, they never strayed from the end game for him. They never strayed from The Genesis.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Leon’s eyes watched his feet as he turned the corner, intent on two things: not tripping over the rocks that jutted up sporadically from the bottom of the cave and telling Caesar what he had just found out.

So when he turned the slight corner to Caesar’s dwelling, he nearly walked on the two of them lying across the floor. Leon had been walking fast, trying to just get there, to just let Caesar know. He hadn’t once expected to find anyone but Caesar lying underneath those sheets.

But, there were two people, without a doubt, and Paige’s blonde hair spilled out over the top of the sheet even if Leon couldn’t see her face. He looked at the two of them, Caesar’s arm wrapped around her, both of their skin bare from what he could tell.

Well, there’s that, I guess, he thought. It was surprising, but didn’t really matter. They both needed to hear it and this was just going to save someone a trip. They got laid and he didn’t have to run anywhere else. Everyone wins.

“Yo, Caesar, get up,” Leon said, nudging Caesar’s back with his foot. “Get up, quick.”

Caesar rolled over, his eyes opening but not having to look around for a single second. He was focused automatically, his face and eyes already knowing who was talking and where they were talking from. Paige moved slower, but rolled over too, lazily trying to cover her chest from being exposed, before realizing someone was standing next to them and then more aggressively hiding herself.

“What is it?” Caesar asked. Leon knew that chip was already making calculations, probably judging some hormones or something in Leon’s own body to make some kind of prediction about what was wrong before it even left his mouth.

“Jerry’s gone.”

Caesar still looked at him but didn’t say anything. His eyes were focused but Leon knew what he was doing, reaching out to either Jerry or Grace or both, trying to see where he went.

“Grace is gone too, but I can’t see her. Either of them, they shut themselves down to me,” he said after a second.

“A few of the others know, but that’s it. They said not to tell anyone besides you.”

Caesar nodded, sitting up but being careful not to pull the sheets from Paige’s body. “No one knows where?”

“No. We woke up and he was gone.”

“Grace must be with him,” Caesar said. “She’s not here.”

“What are you going to do?” Leon asked.

Caesar shook his head and looked down at the ground. “Wait until they get back, I suppose. Jerry and I can’t both leave at the same time, not right now, not until we’re better protected.” He sighed. “Goddamnit.”

The room was quiet for a few seconds.

“So you guys are back to being friends?” Leon asked, finally.

“Shut up,” Paige said, smiling and draping a hand across Caesar’s leg.

*

Manny doubted he would go back, ever. First, he didn’t think there would be any reason to after he did this; The Genesis would finish what it started, and second, if it didn’t, anyone in The Named that saw his face again would murder him immediately. No, he was done there with those people. He didn’t know what came next necessarily, only that he wasn’t going back to The Named. That was forsaken. That was done.

Jerry had left Manny’s wife and child there.

That’s what Manny couldn’t stop thinking about as he trekked out of the cave and started back toward Allencine. Wearing a shroud wrapped around his head to decrease the sun exposure, he thought a lot about it. About how Jerry, his mentor, his friend, his leader, had left Brandi and Dustin’s bodies lying in the sun. Lying there unmarked, unless one considered a bird eating them a marking. Jerry could have brought them with him, could have dragged all the bodies somewhere safe, or at least given them a proper burial. He hadn’t though. He used an excuse that The Genesis would return, or that they couldn’t go back because it was too dangerous, or some other such bullshit. Jerry left everyone there, and in doing that, he left Brandi and Dustin.

He needed to pay for that. By the time Manny walked out of the compound to head to the cave, there wasn’t much left of anyone else to drag. Certainly no possible way to identify anyone, not even as male or female given the scavenging animals’ voracious appetites.

So Jerry needed a bit of punishment too, and Manny would see if he could throw that in the deal.

Manny wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel. He arrived in the city and went to the same place he had synced last time, to the library.

He stuck his hand in the contraption, feeling a bit happy for the first time in a good while. This felt good. It hadn’t felt good last time he stuck his hand in the device; it felt like he was betraying those he cared about. He didn’t care anymore though. Those people had betrayed him. They left his wife and child there; they let them die. And now they followed the man who made it all possible. Caesar-Fucking-Wells. Manny didn’t owe them anything anymore.

But that wasn’t entirely true.

He owed Caesar quite a lot and he owed Jerry a little bit, too. That’s what he decided. That’s why he was here, wasn’t it?

He felt the rods move up his arm, making contact with his mind, and then felt them stop just like last time.

You’ve come back, Manuel Lendoiro. Did you like what we did out there at your little home? I hope no one you cared about was injured.

The good feelings about this died like a cut rose, wilting and fading. This thing, this Genesis or whatever it was, wasn’t his friend. It didn’t care about him or anything he felt. He hated Caesar, but this thing here was just as evil as him. This thing was as corrupt as anything to ever exist.

Fuck you, he said.

What do you want?

I want to watch him die.

Who? The entity asked.

Caesar. He’s coming for The Tourist soon, within a day or so, and when he arrives, I want to be there. I want to watch and I want him to see me watch.

The laugh came again, deep and mind shaking. And what do you offer for this pleasure? What can you possibly give us that would matter at all?

I can give you Jerry. I can show you exactly where he is, and wherever he is, The Named is. You can have both Caesar and Jerry at the same time, and all you have to do is let me watch Caesar die.

Noises floated to him from the library, people walking around, talking quietly, but inside his head there was complete silence. Inside his head, nothing moved for at least twenty seconds.

How will you give us the first iteration?

I can contact him at any time. I have the machine to do it, to activate him for anyone that’s listening. So even if I don’t know where he is, I can find him.

Where is the machine?

It’s hidden, Manny said.

How long will it take you to get it?

A few hours.

Silence fell on him again.

Across the road, the entity said, there is a hotel. Tell them your name; you have a room booked. Tonight a train will pick you up and take you to the city The Tourist resides in. We’ll let you watch what happens to Caesar and then you’ll deliver the machine to us. If you don’t, I want to warn you now, you will understand pain that has not previously existed in this world. A liquidation would seem like an orgasm to what will happen.

That’s fine.

Then be gone, Manuel. I’ll see you in a few days.

Chapter Thirty

Was he wrong?

That’s what Jerry wanted to know, what he was beginning to wonder. Had he been wrong about this entire enterprise? Had he thought something that wasn’t true, that wasn’t even possible?

The bodies in front of him, what was left of them, made him think maybe he had been mistaken. Maybe his own calculations were wrong, maybe he hadn’t given The Genesis enough credit.

He walked through the upper level of the compound, looking at the walls, mainly. They were all black. Smoke and fire having torn though this place too, the concrete able to hold back the flames that drowned the area, but the windows couldn’t. The fire had made it inside and, even here, he saw bodies. People who hadn’t burned, but died from the smoke. People that died trying to find air.

Everyone here had put their trust in him. He was The Eight’s leader. He handpicked all but one of The Eight, who was here before Jerry arrived. Everyone thought that his plan would work, that someone would be born with the necessary intelligence and fortitude to push through to the end, to defeat The Genesis, and then in a few hours The Genesis killed most of those people that believed in him.

“Was I wrong?” He asked aloud, knowing that Grace had come out here with him. She came on her own and they hadn’t spoken once since they began the trip, but now, amid this destruction, maybe she would say why she had come.

“Yes. You were. You wanted something to be true so bad that you justified things that you can’t justify,” she answered.

He stared at the wall, seeing the waves the smoke had made over it, how the black burns were greater at the top than the bottom. “What can’t I justify?”

“How you think a human can ever stop The Genesis. How you think that even someone like Caesar could make a dent in something as powerful as The Genesis. Your hate consumed you, I think. Your hate at what it did and what you had to do to survive after. That’s where you made the mistake. Caesar will try. He’ll go further than anyone else, but he won’t win. He can’t.”

Jerry swallowed. He turned around and walked into the kitchen. People had been able to survive in here, been able to hide from the fire and smoke.

He didn’t know whether to believe Grace. How could she know? How could anyone know? “So what should I do then?”

“Stop. Just quit trying. Let Caesar live out his life, however long that may be now, and don’t get anyone else killed. Don’t bring anyone else into The Named, and over the next hundred years, it will die off. I made my choice because of Caesar, but I still believe in what The Genesis is doing. It’s the right thing to do. Your species can’t be allowed to thrive, not if anything else is to live.”

“Fuck you, Grace,” Jerry said. A thousand years he had lived to get to this point. A thousand years to have a chance, and now, he was supposed to live another thousand with no purpose? With no thought of ending The Genesis? “I’ve come too far to even consider that. You’ve got to know that.”

“I do,” she said. “But you’re going to get a lot of people killed. You’re going to get Caesar killed. Everyone you know dies if you go forward and I want you to understand that. It’s why I came here. You can keep them from dying if you want to, Jerry, but no one else can. You can talk Caesar down. You can explain it to The Named. You can allow them to live their lives in peace and end this futile nonsense. Because that’s what it’s always been, nonsense. The Genesis changed the world in less than a hundred years, and after a thousand, there’s no way to stop it.”

“So go back and tell everyone I was wrong and that all their loved ones died for nothing? That’s your recommendation?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Jerry chuckled, a smile forming on his ancient face. “You might be right. I might have underestimated The Genesis. But you might be wrong too. The Genesis has ruled for a thousand years, but humanity ruled for thirty thousand before that.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The Life of Caesar Wells

By Leon Bastille

Grace was the voice of reason in this entire thing. All the rest of them, for their boisterous claims of wanting to free humanity and put our destiny in our hands and other platitudes, the deaths of those around them didn’t seem to matter all that much. Perhaps when you have men with such disastrous pasts, they can no longer relate to the world around them, perhaps their own personal demons control them. Maybe that’s why Grace saw things from a wider perspective. Maybe that’s why she concerned herself more with keeping humans alive than any of The Eight. Any of The Named.

I didn’t hear her conversation with Jerry, but I did hear it with Caesar. When they returned from the compound, people rushed to Jerry, asking questions, wanting to know where he had gone, if he was okay, and on and on. He went to see those of The Named that he had failed, I suppose.

No one noticed Grace.

She found Caesar though and I was with him when she did. She made her plea. Whatever happens, Grace always did what she felt was right by her conscience. An application doing such, when so many of us failed so miserably in doing the same. Even now, I’m amazed.

“You can’t do this,” she said.

I suppose he knew she was there before she ever spoke. Of course I didn’t, but when she spoke she spoke loud enough so that I could hear, and in return, Caesar spoke from his mouth and not in his head.

“Why?” He asked. He had been looking at me, although I don’t remember what we were talking about. He never went to see Jerry because he didn’t need to, he knew everything he needed to the moment Jerry made his chip available to Caesar. We had been sitting in one of the caverns, probably talking about nothing. I remember I didn’t want to talk about much over those last couple of days because I knew he was leaving. I knew that there was a chance he might not come back.

“You’re going to lose, Caesar. You’re going to die.”

He smiled and leaned all the way back on the rock beneath him, staring up to the ceiling above. The conversation was between them now; he would let me hear it, but I wasn’t any longer on his mind.

“It’s a bit late to tell me that, now, don’t you think?”

“I was fooled, too. I believed because everyone here believed and because I was just happy to be alive. What The Genesis did out there though, how easily it wiped so many out, I can’t be fooled anymore. You have less than a hundred people and you’re planning to go by yourself to capture this application. It will squash you, Caesar.”

“You know I don’t care.”

“Do you care about him? About Leon? Because it’s going to kill him too. And if you walk twenty feet out of this cavern and into the one beside it, you’ll see another thirty people that will end up dead. Liquidated publicly, probably. Do you want that on your conscience?” She asked.

“How’s it on my conscience, Grace? I wouldn’t be the one liquidating them. It’s not me that puts them in the vats and it’s not me that presses the button to start it.”

“Because you can keep them from ever ending up in those vats. You can tell them this has all been a fool’s mission and that if they want to live, then they need to stop this quest.”

Caesar took his hands and folded them over his stomach. He looked so at ease, so comfortable with the whole conversation. Grace just told him I would end up dead and he looked like he might take a nap if she stopped talking.

“What about my mom? What should we do about her?” Caesar said.

“You let her rest, her memory as well as your memory of what happened to her. You let her die, because you’re refusing to now. You’re holding onto her and the rest of your family.”

“Do you really think this is their quest? That I’m going along with them?”

“No,” she said, her voice quieter than before. She had to know where he was going with the reasoning, had to see it and know she had lost. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t lay your own quest down. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the people you care for have to die.”

“I think it does mean that, Grace. I think it meant that the moment that my own parents died. I tried to sacrifice myself and The Genesis refused to let me. So now, others might have to sacrifice themselves as I tried to. Others might have to die. I’m okay with that, Grace. Why aren’t you?”

I went down there to talk to my friend. To spend a few minutes with him before he left, before he put himself at risk. If he didn’t come back, I was completely alone in a world I didn’t understand and didn’t want to be a part of. I went to feel a part of the world I knew for just a few more minutes, to be with someone I cared about for just a little bit longer. And then I heard him say that all of us might have to die. All of us might have to sacrifice ourselves for his own desire.

“The same reason I wasn’t okay with you dying so that I could live,” Grace said. “I made that mistake once and learned from it. You’ll learn from it too, one day, if you continue this.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you’re not the person I thought you were.”

“And if I’m not, would you change your mind in what you did for me?”

Grace didn’t answer right away. The three of us sat in silence and I’m not sure that I ever wanted to leave another room as much I wanted to leave that one. I didn’t want to hear any more, not from him and not from her. But I stayed. Of course I stayed. I’m an idiot and always have been. I stayed and I listened and I knew everything Caesar thought before he left to find The Tourist, and still, somehow, I find myself shocked at what he’s about to do now. I shouldn’t be shocked. I heard him say it all those years ago.

“Yes,” Grace said. “If you can’t find compassion in you, anywhere, for anyone, then why did I save you? Why did I risk myself? If you’ll turn over those that love you for your own beliefs, then I’m not sure you believe in anything besides yourself.”

“I didn’t love you before my parents died,” Caesar said. “I do now. But I’m going forward with this Grace. I think we can win. I don’t think all these people will have to die. I think that I’ll make it, I’ll win, and these people won’t have to live in a cave anymore. Doesn’t that matter at all, what I think?”

“I wish it did,” she answered. “But it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks; it matters what The Genesis can do. That’s all. And it can, it will, destroy you. You and all the rest of them. You can think for as long as you want, for years on years on years, that you might win, but you won’t Caesar. You’ll die and they’ll all die and The Named will be something that only The Genesis will remember in another thousand years. Not a single human will know any of them ever existed.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Caesar stepped from the train and out onto the street. The city he grew up in looked nothing like this one, and Caesar thought that a bit odd. The Genesis wanted everything the same, all of humanity to resemble each other, but yet this city appeared so different than the one his parents raised him in.

It’s a trial. They most likely make all of the cities different in some key way, to see what works best. Small iterations and if they work, they’re spread throughout the world.

In his city, Allencine, the world grew upwards. Buildings towered over everyone, so high that the clouds couldn’t even mark the end of them. Yet here, stepping off the train and into The Tourist’s city, it could not be more opposite.

Rather than building upward, everything had been built down. Where in his city, he would have stepped off with buildings in front of him, large glass windows in which he could see his own reflection, here he saw only endless escalators. He looked up and down the street, and every ten or twenty feet was another pair of escalators. Caesar walked forward, carefully, trying to not draw attention to himself, and looked down one of them. The escalator wound downward in a circular motion, and every thirty feet or so, there was a spot to exit, a floor to enter.

Caesar looked up at the sky. Clear, blue everywhere. Not a single cloud. He looked down at the ground, the concrete beneath him, and the chip inside his head was already pulling everything together. Packaging it so that it made sense before he even looked at the escalator again.

Rain didn’t fall from the sky in this place. Rather, it fell around this city, blocked by some invisible barrier, and then was sucked in by the surrounding ground and funneled back into the city. All the water in this place came from the ground, not from the sky. That’s why these escalators were in open air, no one ever had to worry about rain or snow or any other element falling down on them. He couldn’t see the pipes underneath the city, but they were there, constantly transferring water back and forth between the buildings that rested beside them. He imagined every building was connected, that if he took one escalator down, once he got inside, he would never have to come up unless he wanted a ride somewhere quicker than his feet could take him.

It’ll put trains down there soon, if it isn’t already doing so. Humans will never have to see light again.

He smiled at that, because it seemed like an idea that only something non-human could come up with.

This is where The Tourist lived, beneath the ground here. He had made it and now he needed to go underground and find the correct building, the correct piece of this land. He knew the coordinates, and his mind had mapped it out so that he knew The Tourist was underneath him within a radius of a thousand yards in any direction. That included a lot of buildings to cover, a lot of places it could possibly be.

This is impressive, he said to Grace.

“Yes. The Genesis always impresses,” she said back, but the awe that Caesar held wasn’t in her voice. She probably already knew about this, but more than that, she didn’t want to be here. He told her to stay back, to remain in the cave with the rest of The Named, but she refused. I’m going to see you through, she said. See you through. That was the first time Caesar had ever heard those words used in that combination. See you through meant see you die. Grace’s words meant that she was going to ride this out to the end and die with him. That she was showing up here to die.

Well that’s nice of you, he had said and then stopped talking about it.

Now they were here, staring down into a world that Caesar hadn’t known existed. Staring down into a world of eternal darkness if not for The Genesis’ lighting system.

You ready? He asked.

If you are, she answered.

He was ready. Onward, onward, onward. Onward until one of us dies. That’s what Jerry told him when he first showed up. That this ended when either Caesar died or The Genesis did, and this would be the first chance for it to have him. This would be the first chance for them to see each other as they truly were, not with the I of applications chaining him down and it hiding behind some screen with white lines dripping down it. He arrived to take a piece of what it valued, a piece that would get him just a bit closer to seeing it in person. Maybe Grace was right. Maybe he had no chance at all and it would overwhelm him the moment he stepped inside the city. Maybe he would die before he ever glimpsed the tourist.

Either way, Caesar stepped onto the escalator and moved down into the world beneath.

*

The informant says the theory should be here soon, if he’s not already.

Have you let X-N-O-A know?

I often wonder why humanity doesn’t call them by the names we do? Why they constantly create these catchy phrases for them? The Tourist. It’s…silly.

Regardless, does it know?

Of course. It’s prepared. Everything is in place. We’re just waiting on the theory to show, once he does, it will all unfold as planned.

And the informant?

He’ll watch and then he’ll hand us over the first iteration and then he’ll die. We’ll have everything we need to make the theory compromise.

But will he? That’s what we don’t know and what you’re betting so much on, that he will compromise. If he doesn’t, what then? Kill him? Because we can’t free him.

I sometimes wonder if creating you wasn’t a mistake. You’re more like an attorney than a companion.

This all would have ended long ago if not for me.

Maybe, but it doesn’t mean all of this isn’t annoying. He’ll compromise. He’s human. He compromised with his parents didn’t he? Begged us not to murder them, begged us to murder him instead. He’ll do it again and then when he finally reaches us, his mind won’t have any other choice but to continue compromising. He’ll compromise all the way to our doorstep and then we’ve won. Stop worrying so much.

What about the chip? We didn’t plan on that.

We planned something like it. We knew the first iteration wouldn’t let him come without something in his head, something similar to his own.

But we didn’t plan for what he has, and we didn’t plan for one of our own to give it to him. None of that was foreseen.

Trying to reach perfection and being perfect are two very different things.

Not even that concerns you? That we have our own now turning? We have our own helping this theory? That’s just another piece of this that you’re comfortable with?

I’m not sure I would say I’m comfortable with it, but the situation was handled. The application is deleted and it’s known what happened. If others break free, we’ll do the same to them. The chip he received is advanced, but it’s not really the issue. We want him smart. We want him capable. We want him able to destroy us. If the chip helps, then fine.

No, the chip isn’t the issue. The issue is that our own turned. That’s what we didn’t see, what we missed, and neither of us knows how it’s going to impact everything in the future.

Not exactly, but we know the probability. Ninety-eight point two percent that it changes nothing.

One point eight that it changes something.

We’ve always liked making bets. I’ll go with the odds.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Paige didn’t know if she regretted sleeping with Caesar or not, which felt weird. In the past, if she slept with someone and it had been a mistake, she knew immediately, the minute he rolled off of her. This, though, was different. She shared his bed for the few days before he left, and now he was gone, to a city that she had never visited. The chance for regret littered all of her decisions, everything she had done since they brought Caesar to the compound, maybe even all the way to the last night they spent together. She should have come to him sooner, should have spent every night she could in his bed, but she hadn’t, and then at the end, she went to him. Now what? Now he was gone and might not ever come back.

Might not ever come back.

Paige had never loved before. Never even been close to it. She grew up in a world where everyone around her was so far beneath her thinking that she couldn’t connect, couldn’t identify, and just like everyone else in The Named, only survived as long as she did because she recognized that. How could she love anyone, any of them? It wasn’t that she tried to keep from doing it, just the banality of everyone she came across almost repulsed her, and now, when she met a person she connected with, she pushed him away for so long. Let fear of his anger, let her own guilt, stop her from doing what she wanted.

And now he was gone. Now he might not ever come back.

She would go on living even if Caesar didn’t. She had to remain on this Earth until The Genesis killed her, and that meant if Caesar didn’t return, then she had the rest of her life to live alone. There weren’t any other men that would step in, that she would find. It’s not like Jerry, or any of them for that matter, were searching for more people to bring in to The Named. No, this was her shot, and she took it too late, and now she might never get another. Now, the person that she tasted love with may never come back to share it with her again. So why had she done it in the first place? Why had she stepped out of the zone she placed herself in and showed those feelings, given herself to him? Why, knowing that he might die a day or two later?

What was the cliché? It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

That’s why she didn’t know if she regretted sleeping with him. Because she didn’t know if that was true, but she had a feeling she would soon. Jerry believed, even now—Paige saw it. He hadn’t told her everything that went on when he went back to the compound, but he told her some, told her that Grace said they should stop, that Caesar would fail. He doubted for a moment, looking at those dead bodies and his shattered compound, but only for a moment. Caesar would make it, he said. Caesar would do what he was born to do. Grace didn’t know if she believed, not like Jerry. Caesar was special; she knew that. Knew it since the beginning, but special didn’t mean invulnerable. It didn’t mean you could start fire in the sky and have it rain down across every living soul that walked outside. It didn’t mean you could wipe out an entire ideology, basically, in a few minutes. But that’s what The Genesis had done. It took a group of people that believed so fiercely in something they would have died without hesitation, and scattered those beliefs within a few seconds. Caesar was a man. That’s all. His power limited, even with that chip in his head.

So she thought that soon she would understand whether the cliché was true. She had gone without love and now she would go the rest of her life knowing briefly what it felt like.

Jerry and she sat on chairs now, finally. Makeshift things, but better than the rock beneath. They sat on chairs and both of them just stared past each other. The rest of The Eight were gone, with family or, in Manny’s case, just missing. Another bombshell that no one had noticed until this morning. Missing again with no word or trace of where he had gone.

“Maybe he went back to the compound,” Jerry had said, but it didn’t sound like he believed it. It didn’t matter either, if he went there or somewhere else, right now there wasn’t anything they could do. There was nowhere else to go besides this cave, so if Manny was the leak—and how couldn’t he be? She had heard the things he said to her, heard what he thought of Caesar—then whether they were sitting out in the sand with the sun beating down on them, or in this shade, The Genesis would find them.

Everyone else had someone to be with. Paige and Jerry didn’t, or rather, they had each other. So they sat and didn’t talk much, because there was nothing else to do but wait.

“Are you connected with him?” She asked.

“Not right now. It’s got to be sporadic, for multiple reasons. One, that chip needs to be focusing only on what’s in front of him, not on what’s behind him, what’s back here. Also, I don’t know what’s possible. I don’t know if I connect with him now that he’s in the city, if The Genesis will access me somehow. He’ll know whether or not it’s possible and he’ll contact me when he needs to.”

“Did you tell him about Manny?”

“No, but it wouldn’t really matter if I did. He knows the dangers and he can’t turn around. There’s no help coming and there’s no way for him to leave.”

So they waited. That’s all there was. To wait and hope to whatever cosmic entity may exist that he returned. That Manny wasn’t the leak. That The Genesis wasn’t all powerful. That somehow this might work.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Execution.

That’s what mattered.

The plan was right; Caesar didn’t doubt that. He knew where The Tourist lived and he knew when it would be there, what hours of the day it stayed inside and what hours it accomplished other business. He knew where the strong holds lay in the building, where security was tightest, and what kind of security actually surrounded The Tourist. Without a doubt, it was guarded. Maybe the entities guarding it knew what they were guarding and maybe they didn’t, maybe they only knew their purpose was to keep it safe. Caesar didn’t think it would make much of a difference either way, they would react the same when they realized why he was there.

They would kill him.

The plan involved the holes in its protection. Caesar studied the applications protecting it, and knew which were the weakest—just like human beings, these things weren’t rolled off an assembly line. Each had different attributes and trouble overcoming separate biases. At noon, the weakest team took over. He didn’t know if The Genesis realized this, that there was a weakest team, but he saw it. They would be slower to react, slower to move, slower to think. It would take them longer to realize what he was doing and to signal for help. He had an hour. For one hour, that team guarded The Tourist alone, and in that hour everything had to be done. If he went one minute over, he had no chance of survival. They would fall on him like animals and rip him apart.

He would capture The Tourist tomorrow, and by tomorrow night, be at home with Paige. By tomorrow night, this small war would have escalated into something The Genesis might not be able to stop.

“You can still turn back,” Grace said.

His eyes were closed and he was turning the plan over and over in his mind. He didn’t have to write a single piece out, not a single equation, all of it rested perfectly in his head, every single second and every single movement he would need to neutralize the opposition and leave him looking at The Tourist.

You’re kidding, right?

“No. I figured one last try wouldn’t hurt.”

Why does death scare you so bad, Grace?

“Not my death. Yours, Caesar. Yours. That’s all that matters to me. That’s all that ever mattered. The others, they should matter to you; they’re the ones you’re supposed to lead. They don’t matter to me. You do.”

But I’m okay with dying. I’m okay if I don’t make it out tomorrow.

“So I should be too?”

This is what I want. Cato isn’t coming back. I’ll only see him when I dream. So why not fight just for that alone? Why not die just for that alone? That I can only see my brother in my dreams. That’s what I want, Grace. Why can’t you want it for me too?”

She didn’t say anything, and he kept his eyes closed.

Stay here tomorrow. Please. You’ve seen me through, all the way, and tomorrow you’ll know whether I make it out or not. You don’t have to be there, you don’t have to witness it to know.

“You’re so fucking dumb, Caesar.”

He smiled.

What would you look like if you were human?

“I don’t know. What do you see me as?”

My mother, he said, chuckling out loud as his thoughts transferred to her.

“Maybe. How much have you humans rubbed off on me that I’m ten times older than your mother but would still wish to look younger than she did?”

Vanity. That’s your weakness, huh, Grace?

“I suppose.”

Will you stay? He asked.

“No. I’m coming.”

I won’t try to protect you. I need you to know that. When I go, my only focus is getting The Tourist out. If it comes down to it or you, I’m getting it out.

“I know, Caesar.”

They were quiet for a long time. Caesar didn’t think of the plans for tomorrow. He didn’t think of Paige. His mind went back to his family, trying to see them for what they were before they ended up in that vat. There were so many memories, so many millions of memories, and yet that one always tried to rush to the front, always tried to break through whatever peace he found when he imagined them happy.

“Do you think there’s anything after this?” Grace asked. “An afterlife?”

No, of course not. Don’t tell me you do. I remember reading about The Singularity during the first few decades, with religious people everywhere saying applications didn’t have souls so they could never earn salvation.

“No, I don’t, but I hope there is. The Genesis hasn’t detected anything, but The Genesis doesn’t know the entirety of the universe. Doesn’t know the entirety of human psychology. So it’s possible. There could be something.”

Do you think applications could go?

He heard the laughter in her voice as she spoke, “If we’re good enough.”

What happens there? Golden roads and all you can eat buffets?

“In my heaven, you get to stop thinking so hard, Caesar. That’s all.”

*

He’s here and he doesn’t know you are, Manny thought. The train looked down on the rows and rows of escalators, a world different than anything Manny had ever seen before. He’s down there, underground somewhere, thinking that tomorrow he’ll do what Jerry beat into his head he was meant to do.

He knew The Named recognized he was gone by now, most likely recognized he was the traitor, but that didn’t matter at this point. Manny was at peace with it all. It stung at first but he continually went back to what his wife’s corpse probably looked like now. Her eyes gone, pecked at until blood spilled and then eaten with relish. Her cheeks were probably missing too, being nothing more than fat, so tender. Her teeth would be showing through her face, even though her mouth was closed. Her black skin gone, either eaten by bacteria or simply huge chunks missing from where the bigger animals got to her. Or maybe ants. Who knew?

Whenever he started questioning what he’d done, he went back to that. Went to that scene, and it set things right again.

The train was empty besides him; it pulled up just as he had been told and he got on. It took off as soon as he sat and for the past ten hours he’d been riding across lands he’d never seen before. He crossed water a little bit back, large expanses of ocean blue, just a few shades darker than the sky above.

He had arrived finally. He realized he would probably only live a few more hours. That as soon as The Genesis had what it wanted, he was dead, but he was fine with it. Manny thought it humorous, both he and Caesar being driven by the same basic urge—vengeance for their families. Caesar wouldn’t get his, and that was too bad, Manny supposed.

A sync began extending from the floor to his right, the first movement on the entire train trip. It pushed up from the transparent floor, as if taking shape out of the floor around it. Manny watched until it stopped at his chest height. He stuck his hand in, quite clear that he wasn’t supposed to just sit here starting at it.

You remember your part of this, right? You haven’t conveniently forgotten over the past day?

No, he said. He was happy with his part, happy with everything that came next. He didn’t mind the condescension in the entity’s voice, the same entity he talked to every time he stuck his hand in one of these. As soon as he’s dead, I’ll give you the instrument to find Jerry.

Things have changed a bit on our side.

Manny’s eyebrows raised. He was at peace and change always disrupted peace, good or bad; peace couldn’t last when things were in transition. How?

Well, would you like to see your Jerry die as well?

He never considered watching Jerry die. Manny wanted him dead, for sure, but he didn’t necessarily want to see it. Jerry deserved to die, for leaving Brandi and Dustin, but Manny didn’t want to watch. Jerry had been a lot of things to him. A mentor. A replacement for his father. A friend. A confidant. He had been the closest person in Manny’s life right up until Brandi. For nearly twenty years, Jerry led him and taught him, and yes, he had to die, but Manny didn’t want to see it. At all.

No. That’s not what I offered. I said I would give him to you in exchange for watching Caesar die. That was our deal.

That’s true. That’s what we said. I have a question though, do you control this train or do I?

There wasn’t any point in answering. The point was in the question, in showing who controlled what. Who was at whose mercy.

If you want Jerry, then I watch Caesar die. If not, then go ahead and throw this thing into the ground, Manny said. His teeth ground together involuntarily and his jaw flexed. This thing, he had been nearly bred to fight it. Bred to kill it. And he was making a fucking deal, sure, but he knew what it was. He wouldn’t bow to it, ever. Not before and not now. His allegiance never changed, it was others who changed theirs, and so now they had to pay, but that didn’t mean this thing here held any control over his mind.

So stubborn, Manuel Lendoiro. So stubborn. Well, things have changed whether you like them or not. You do not have to watch the first iteration die, but we will need him before we kill Caesar. What I mean here is, we will capture Caesar, and then expect you to hand over your instrument. Once we have your Jerry, we will kill them both, and you can watch whoever you want. Sound fair?

Motherfucker. Manny swallowed to keep from opening his mouth and cursing at the empty train. Did it sound fair? No, it didn’t sound fair, but what choice did he really have? If it captured Caesar and wanted Jerry at the same time, then that’s what he would have to do.

I get to watch Caesar die. That’s the deal? Whatever else happens, I watch.

Certainly. What you want is what we want, we just needed to change the order of things a bit.

I’m fucking sure, Manny said. He took his hand from the sync and leaned back in his chair. The sync disappeared back into the floor and Manny stared out the window, looking at the weird city below, feeling like he may have just uncaged a beast that he couldn’t control.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Caesar wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was safe, The Genesis could be scanning, could be searching for any kind of communication coming out of the city that wasn’t authorized, but he didn’t think so. More, he thought if something was to latch onto his conversation, he would know and could react. Still, he probably shouldn’t be doing this. The safest thing to do would be to stay in this bed and do nothing until tomorrow morning, even talk to Grace using his mouth as opposed to the chip. But if this was his last night on Earth, he wouldn’t let The Genesis dictate how he spent it, not completely. If something went wrong, then he would deal with it, but he still wanted to talk to Jerry.

You there? He said.

Yes, Jerry answered. They were conversing over thousands of miles with virtually no lag time in between them, conversing strictly through metal implants in their heads. It was miraculous, something only dreamed about by humanity, only made possible by the creature Caesar wanted to destroy.

How’s Paige? He asked.

She’s stressed. Might not have been the smartest thing, what you two did.

Maybe not, but too late now.

Jerry waited a few seconds before speaking again. She wants you to come back, in a way that I don’t think anyone else can.

Caesar spoke to her before he left, but not since. He couldn’t. She hadn’t cried when he left and they hadn’t mentioned the wound on her back or the fact that he might die. They had hugged and kissed and then Caesar left. Simple. Basic. He wanted to talk to her though, wanted to tell her…What? That he loved her? Was that what he was going to tell the woman he had ignored for the past six months? Did he?

I will right? Make it back?

Yeah. You will.

And you told her that? Caesar asked.

Yeah, I told her the same. I picked you because you will make it back. You’re the only one that can.

If I don’t…Caesar paused, thinking about what his next words would be. The chip in his head could have picked out a billion in an instant, but he wanted them to be the right words, the ones that he chose for very specific reasons. If I don’t come back, just tell her I’m glad I met her. Okay?

Jerry chuckled inside Caesar’s head. That’s one way to put it. You’re glad you met her. That’s what you want me to say?

Yeah. It encompasses a lot.

Jerry was quiet again, most likely understanding everything that came along with those few words. That meeting her killed his parents, his friend’s wife, and completely destroyed his life. That he was here now, about to go into a world completely blind and look for something that would most likely kill him, despite what Jerry said—and even so, he was glad she was in his life.

I’ll tell her.

If I don’t make it back, what happens to the rest of The Named? What happens to everyone else?

I’ll take care of them, Jerry said. But you’re going to make it back. In two days you’ll be back here with us.

And if I don’t, what happens? That’s what I’m asking.

Then I suppose The Named will end in a few years, Jerry said.

You won’t try to find another one of me? Caesar asked.

I don’t have the energy to. I found you and that’s what I set out to do. If we can’t succeed with you then we won’t succeed with anyone, at all. If you don’t come back, I’ll take care of the group, but when the last one dies, The Named dies.

That’s what Caesar thought the answer would be; he just wanted to hear it aloud. He wanted Jerry to say it. If you don’t succeed, that’s it. We’re done. He wanted the finality of this in his head, that Jerry wouldn’t try to go on, that no one else would try, that what The Genesis began breaking would shatter if he didn’t survive tomorrow.

So it’s pretty important that I make it, huh? He said, laughing from his brain to Jerry’s.

Not really. It’s been a lot of work meeting you. Might feel good to rest for a little while, Jerry quipped.

They waited for a few seconds with neither of them saying anything. It felt like sitting in the same room with someone, both of them silent, but more intimate, too. Like they both stared at each other in that room, neither looking away amid the silence.

Thanks, Jerry said. Thanks for what you’re going to do tomorrow. Humanity doesn’t know it, no one does, but the entire human race owes you thanks. No one else has ever attempted anything like this; you’re the only one. But, I’m not just thanking you for what you’re doing for them. Thanks for what you’ve done for me too, Caesar. You’ve given my life purpose again. You’ve given me something that was missing for nine hundred or more years. You’re going to make it tomorrow, and I’m going to die happy because of you. So thank you for that, too.

Caesar thought the words might be lies even if Jerry didn’t know that they were. He would try tomorrow, would kill everything that got in his way, but he might die. According to Grace, he probably would, so Jerry might be wrong. Still, the old man sounded like he believed it. It didn’t sound like this was just a pep talk for Caesar’s sake. The old man was actually thanking him, not quite tearing up on the other side of the conversation, but close.

Get some sleep, Jerry said. We’ll talk tomorrow night.

*

Wires lined every wall in the building, crisscrossing each other in a web that left virtually no space for even air to travel through. Wires, in fact, lined every wall in the city, allowing for information to travel from building to building. It obviously wasn’t the only method of communication available to the entities inside the city, but it was probably the oldest, and also allowed for other things to take place when needed.

Such as now.

No one could see the wires, of course, but a living organism was growing on them. Tiny red dots, barely the size of a pen tip, began sprouting from the wires, coalescing on the copper. Leon would have recognized them instantly as what he saw floating through the air at the compound. Small dots at first, tiny ones, in sporadic places, but the speed picked up as the message came down. The dots practically took over, covering the copper, tiny living organisms growing like moss in between the walls. Those tiny dots were alive, entities the same as any other application, but with one purpose. Self-destruction. When they were told, or decided, it was the right time to die, fire would erupt from each one of the million organisms—so many that the tiny eruptions would feel as if one large detonation had occurred. Fire would engulf the entirety of the room and the floors above and below it as well. Fire would burst out from the descending escalators and streak long into the sky. If the organisms self-destructed, with the millions already growing, no one in the room would have chance of surviving.

Just precautions, though. That wasn’t anyone’s goal in this endeavor. The Genesis hadn’t gotten this far, however, without being prepared for all possible eventualities.

The interior of the walls, that which humans could see, looked normal enough, but of course they weren’t. Blankets lined the entire interior of the room, from the center of the floor to the center of the ceiling. Blankets that would coalesce onto any figure they needed to, all at once.

Other applications were coming now too, ones that not even the first iteration knew about. Some walked through the front door of the building and others floated in through the open windows. Leon might have described The Genesis’ approach as overkill. All the applications were deadly, capable of killing hundreds in seconds. Most were also capable of detaining, but The Genesis wanted a few around that only knew to kill. Just in case. Success was paramount tomorrow, and it knew that. It knew the importance of instilling compromise.

More would continue arriving. Enough so that even if the theory brought an army with him, none would escape. No chances could be taken tomorrow; things must go exactly as planned. Compromise must be had. It must be instilled.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Caesar looked at the entrance. Grace remained silent next to him, hovering around his ear. He knew she was frightened, knew she didn’t want to be here and didn’t want him to be here. Still, she hadn’t left.

The building contained three separate rooms, each inside and slightly lower than the one before it, like a Russian doll that fits inside one another. He would have to get through the outer two rings to enter the final room, where The Tourist should be. He laid everything out in his head the same as a blueprint on paper. He had thirty seconds and he would need to begin his move.

Thanks, he said to Grace.

You’re welcome, she answered.

Caesar stepped forward, walking to the glass door in front of him. He waited for Grace to say something else, to ask him one more time to stop, but she didn’t. She said nothing, and then the glass door was opening, lowering into the ground so that he could step forward into the outer ring of the apartment.

A human stood at the counter, just as he should have been. A young guy, probably just starting out in his assignment—hospitality, Caesar imagined. Caesar walked to the counter, quickly, not flashing his eyes to the left or right though he knew the applications waited there.

“I’m sorry, sir. This is a private building.”

“Is it?” Caesar asked. He saw the man’s eyes waver, looking to his left first, seeing what was happening with the applications. This hadn’t happened to the kid before, and he didn’t know what to do or say. Everyone knew this building was for private use; no one came in here for any reason. But here this man was, asking something that he shouldn’t have been asking, in a place that he shouldn’t have been, and what the hell was the kid supposed to do? No one trained him for this.

Caesar saw it all in the kid’s face, watched as the temperature in his skin rose a few degrees from the blood speeding to it. Everything was as it should be.

He felt the application reaching for him perhaps a second before it grabbed him.

Caesar moved. He lunged up and over the counter with one pump of his leg, the invisible clamp trying to come down on his arm missing by an inch, and then he was standing behind the kid. Both applications were invisible, and if they hadn’t just moved directly in front of the kid as Caesar predicted, it might be over. He planned on them being there but he still couldn’t see them. They had to be there at this exact moment or he had no chance of ever seeing them.

Caesar pulled the knife from his pants lining, a small thing, but sharp. He held the blade in between his thumb and finger, moving with a speed that was hard for the human eye to keep up with. One moment his hand was empty and the next it held the weapon. He flashed his fingers forward, the chip in his head calculating everything as he moved, knowing exactly where and exactly how.

The knife cut an inch into the kid’s neck, going straight through his flesh, digging deep into the meat but missing any chance of bone or spinal cord, not wanting to stop moving. The knife exited the front of his neck, having sliced an inch deep from the very back to the very front, and with the final flick of Caesar’s wrist, the blood sprayed out in front of the dying kid. Caesar saw the kid’s knees beginning to buckle, so grabbed his hair to keep him from falling.

The blood did exactly as Caesar planned.

It sprayed out like water in front of a fan, dousing the two applications in front of the counter, showing them for the first time. Both stood seven feet tall, the clamps that had been about to lock down on Caesar’s wrists actually something closer to a tentacle. Neither one contained a head or legs, but were floating globes that resembled squids, except possessing no eyes. A torso with those tentacles coming off of them, tentacles that were meant to grab and trap, not to release until given permission. Before he had seen through them; now they were the color of blood, with more of each one being revealed every second as the arteries in the bellhop’s neck sprayed out their contents into the small foyer.

Caesar grabbed the top of the boy’s hair and jumped again, lifting both himself and the bleeding kid on top of the counter, continuing the spray, trying to douse the things in front of him as much as he could. But the applications were moving now, having recognized what was happening. They were moving in tandem spreading to opposite sides of the room, trying to make him choose which one he would attack. Already other applications were being alerted, Caesar knew that. Seconds, that’s all he had. Seconds to finish off these blood coated creatures.

He released the boy who immediately collapsed onto the counter, blood now only trickling from his neck.

Leaping straight out, Caesar stretched his arms to either side, grabbing onto one tentacle of each, and either by plan or reaction, the tentacle wrapped itself around Caesar’s wrist, locking both of the applications to him.

He pulled.

He felt the strength of the applications, felt their fear too, felt it pulsing from those tentacles into his own body.

No, please don’t!

The applications shouted the exact same phrase at him at the exact same time, communicating in maybe the only way they could, directly into his mind. They were strong, but not comparable, not to what his own body had become.

He looked through the clear glass door in front of him. No one should have been there. The building was too low underground, too far off limits for someone to have shown up. Especially a dead person. Cato was there though, looking at him. His eyes were the white snow of The Genesis. He stood solid; his body not melting off piece by piece. Caesar looked at his dead brother while his hands gripped applications that must have been similar to the ones that walked him into Cato’s execution. The boy’s blood dripped from Caesar’s wrists as the tentacles spread the wealth from themselves to him. They were begging, the applications, knowing almost intuitively that they couldn’t overcome what was before them, couldn’t stop it. They had never known fear like this before, the fear of dying, the fear of no longer existing. Caesar realized for the first time, holding those two creatures, that they didn’t understand mortality until this moment. That none of them, save maybe Grace, understood such a concept. They were gods, supposed to live forever, and for the first time they realized they wouldn’t.

The words they communicated with turned into panicked shrieks as they realized they couldn’t pull away. They couldn’t break the man’s grip.

Caesar kept watching Cato. His brother didn’t move and Caesar’s hands didn’t weaken their grip. Cato’s eyes weren’t vibrating with rage like they had before. They were calm. Just watching. His entire face taking in what Caesar was doing.

The applications’ fear grew so that begging was impossible. Pure, insane, panic controlled them. Had they known that feelings like this were possible? Had they known it from the other humans they walked to their graves, or their vats. Had they even cared?

No. They hadn’t cared until this moment. Until Caesar had them locked in his hands and death was imminent.

The chip activated.

Currents flowed from Caesar’s brain, electrical currents that should have killed him but instead channeled through the metal muscles that moved him. The currents flowed to his hands and then into the creatures he held. Creatures that he didn’t understand, that he didn’t want to understand. Creatures that had walked any number of people to their deaths but now stood shrieking and crying to be spared.

Caesar felt the moment that they knew there was no escape. Felt the fear sink into him the same as it did them, knowing that death had arrived and what a peculiar fucking thing that was. Death, for gods.

The two blood coated applications dropped to the floor, Caesar still holding onto the tentacles.

He blinked and Cato was no longer there. Only a glass door with blood spattered across it. Other applications were coming now; he had to move.

*

He went down the escalator like a ghost, barely touching the stairs as he threw himself across them five and six at a time.

Caesar reached the second ring of the building. One away from The Tourist.

But he knew immediately, without any doubt, that he would never get to The Tourist the moment his foot came off the escalator, the moment he touched the floor of the second room. It was supposed to be empty. No one was supposed to be here. Not at this time, not on this day. And yet, his eyes didn’t deceive him. Something was here with him, something that showed The Genesis knew—it knew he was coming and the thing before him waited. Waited for him to make it past the first ring and into the second, waited for other applications to come and block his exit.

Caesar was trapped. He turned his head and looked back up the escalator. It would take him seven seconds to reach the top, another four to make it across the lobby, and maybe ten more to get out of this vicinity. That wasn’t enough time. They would fall on him, the coming applications, before he ever had a chance. The only way out was forward. The only way to survive was to try to get to the inner ring and take The Tourist. He couldn’t go back.

Caesar’s father sat in front of him.

The second room was circular, with a hallway going to Caesar’s right and left, and the door to the third and final room sitting directly in front of the escalators. All he had to do was cross ten feet and open the door. Except his father, Sam Wells, sat in front of it, on a chair with one leg crossed over the other. His father that was as dead as Cato had been upstairs, but Caesar wasn’t having a vision now. This thing was real. This thing, if Caesar was to walk up to it and place a hand on its arm, wouldn’t disappear. Its eyes weren’t black with streaks of white running down then. Its eyes were the exact color that Caesar’s father’s had been in real life.

Real life.

“That’s not him,” Grace said. “You’ve got to go. Forward or backward but you can’t wait here any longer.”

He’d been staring at this thing for a few seconds, wasting seconds that he didn’t have, that couldn’t be wasted.

“Hey, Caesar,” his Dad said from his chair, looking at him with the same face he had used countless times when Caesar arrived at the old apartment. Looking at him as if he wasn’t dead. As if he hadn’t been fed to children. As if he was real and this was real and Caesar and he were goddamn kin.

Caesar went forward and grabbed the thing by its neck, lifting it into the air from the chair, bringing it to eye level. His father’s eye bulged immediately, his face cringing at the assault, as if it hadn’t known what would happen, as if it was completely shocked at his son’s reaction.

“What are you doing?” Sam’s voice croaked out.

His grip loosened just a bit, hearing his father’s voice question him, wondering why his son was strangling him.

“End him,” Grace said. “Now, or we die.”

“No,” Sam said, his voice barely above a whisper, unable to get air into his lungs.

It wasn’t his father. Not in the slightest. It shouldn’t have been here at all. His father was dead and this thing was here to do exactly what it was doing, to slow him down if only for a moment. To leech that much more time away from him and his goal. The eyes wide in shock in front of him weren’t his Dad’s, weren’t anything close to his father. It was another application, a trick, a goddamn play on his emotions to keep him out. To keep him away for just a few more seconds.

“Hurry,” Grace said, pleading now. Feeling danger that Caesar didn’t feel because he couldn’t take his thoughts away from the thing he held in his hand, away from the thing that looked like his father and was begging for his life—not with feeling sent through tentacles but through Sam Well’s voice.

Caesar tightened his grip, squeezing down with all the force he had in him, trying to close off any possible valve inside the man’s neck, trying to make it so neither blood nor oxygen could flow. The metal in his body did more than that, though; he felt the thing’s neck, or whatever was inside holding it together, snap. A dry sound popped from inside his neck, like a twig breaking on a path. The eyes though, they didn’t die, they didn’t fade as they should have.

Caesar kept squeezing, now trying to push his hands through the meat encasing this application, trying to completely kill it, to destroy any semblance of the creature it impersonated. Of his father.

The eyes in front of him started to gray over. Not glaze, but actually turn gray as if dark clouds rolled across his irises. Caesar didn’t quit squeezing though. If they grayed then they grayed, but the thing would die. He felt skin give way beneath his hand and his fingers actually dive inside the flesh.

And then the man’s eyes burst.

Blood and other liquids didn’t shoot forward. Only a gas. A gray colored gas that shot forth like there was pressure behind it, trying to force it out into the air, trying to make sure it found the person in front of it. Caesar breathed it in, having no other choice, and it smelled bitter, like rusted metal might taste on the tongue. It took him two breaths before he stopped sucking in air, but by then it was too late.

He released the eyeless man, holes now where his eyeballs had been a moment before. The chip in his head processed the chemical immediately: a tranquilizer, and already coursing from his lungs into his bloodstream, following the same path oxygen normally would. Caesar fell to his knees first, unable to keep them from buckling. The application that looked like his father lay in front of him, its purpose finished, no longer showing any sign of life. The door in front of Caesar began opening, and from his knees, he watched the room he needed to get into open up before him, unable to move.

*

Manny watched how quickly and efficiently Caesar killed the kid at the reception desk with mixed emotions: awe, disgust, jealousy. Awe at the pure grace he showed, how quickly he moved across barriers like the counter and the precision with which he opened the boy’s neck and revealed his enemies. He was, without a doubt, powerful. Disgust that someone could do that. Disgust that someone could look another human in the face, and then murder without another thought. And jealousy because Manny knew he could never be Caesar.

Maybe Jerry had been right. Maybe Caesar was the one that could save humanity. Clearly the transformation was done, no human moved that quick, ever. But what Manny witnessed showed more, it showed the ruthlessness that Jerry had searched for, the ability to kill indiscriminately, without care, simply because it had to be done. Caesar had it in spades. Manny watched on a giant screen as Caesar cut the young man up to protect himself.

Jerry was right. The thought felt calm. No anger. No malice. Just fact. He was seeing the man that they had all searched for, seeing him perform in actual life. I’m about to get him killed, was the next thought that came through his mind. That same calm stillness permeating. It didn’t matter at this point, though. All of those thoughts were too late. The realization that Jerry had found the one he wanted didn’t matter anymore because Brandi and Dustin were dead.

The stillness over Manny’s mind carried with it a weight that he didn’t fully grasp. The weight of responsibility. The weight of knowledge. He was watching the thing he’d helped build, the person that would free humanity, and he was watching because he had set that person up to die—which he did because Manny had gotten his own wife and son killed trying to stop this person once already.

You didn’t trust Jerry. You didn’t want him to be right. You didn’t want Caesar to be the one.

Again, stillness accompanied by mounting pressure.

Now they’re dead and he is what Jerry said he would be.

On the screen, Manny watched as the blood soaked applications sagged in Caesar’s hands. He’d killed them without even a fight. He killed them by touching them.

And now he’s going to die next. Because of you. And then after that, Jerry.

Because of you.

He felt it happen, the snap. It felt like his brain shifting in his skull, or rather, a piece of it shifting while the rest remained intact. He felt his brain break, neural passageways suddenly rupturing.

Caesar was moving down the escalator at a break-neck speed, and Manny saw the man waiting for him at the end. The man waiting for him on the chair, sitting in front of the door that Manny was behind.

The stillness of his mind disappeared then, and Manny started to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed until the door opened and he walked out to look at Caesar lying on the ground. He managed to hold in the laughter then, but he couldn’t stop smiling.

*

Caesar fell to the ground, his entire body paralyzed. The chip in his head uselessly trying to command him to move, to get up, to do something. The door stood open and he looked in from his spot on the floor. He saw nothing. No one. No application. Nothing for him to take, no reason for him to be here.

“Caesar,” Grace whispered, her voice breaking. “Caesar they’re everywhere. The room is lined with applications.”

Go. Get out of here, he said back to her, his mouth unable to move and his vocal chords unable to vibrate.

“I can’t leave you.”

Go! He roared, his mind slashing out at her in a way that he hadn’t before. Anger and frustration raging from inside his head, raging but unable to find any kind of release besides his words to her.

He felt her leave, felt her drifting back up the escalator. He saw what she saw, that at the top of the escalator, fifty machines stood waiting on him. At least fifty. Things that he had never seen before, things made of metal and sharp edges rather than the invisible applications The Genesis usually used with humanity. It didn’t matter. They could stay up there. He wasn’t going to be able to move, to get up and fight them, to try to break through.

He could only stare at the empty room, the one that he had come here to rob.

Caesar heard footsteps from inside, as if someone had just stood and started walking. Someone was in there, maybe The Tourist or maybe someone else. Someone had been waiting though. Someone that knew he was coming, that had set the trap that awaited him.

Manny appeared around the corner of the door. He was smiling, a smile that wasn’t natural, that had almost no end, that was trying its best to wrap itself completely around Manny’s head.

“Hey, Caesar.”

Caesar looked at the smile and wanted to rip out every one of the man’s teeth and make him eat them, one by one.

“That was some nice work you did upstairs. I’m truly shocked by how easily you made it down here. Good job.”

He watched as a tiny chuckle started in Manny’s stomach and as he put his hand to his mouth to try and stifle it.

“We’re going to have some fun,” Manny said.

Caesar saw the applications for the first time, saw them taking form, the applications that Jerry had called blankets peeling off the walls, ceilings, and floors. One after another, more than Caesar could count and all of them floating his way, through the room, over furniture.

“It’s ready to take you, I guess,” Manny said. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

The applications moved around him, traveling like fog but careful not to touch the man standing above Caesar.

They fell on him with a surety that only gods can know.

Caesar kept staring at that smile, the unending smile, until the blankets blocked off his ability to see anything.

To be continued in The Singularity: Emissaries…

The Singularity:

Emissaries

by David Beers

Copyright © 2015 by David Beers

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Chapter One

Manny knew something was wrong, for a brief moment. Not for long, because everything turned okay very quickly, but he did know—if only for an instant—that something had changed and that it wasn’t good. Not for Manny. Not for anyone that he would ever be around again. For an instant, when he sat in that room alone, watching what Caesar did upstairs in the lobby and how quickly he descended the escalators, Manny had insight into what he would become. Like a man watching a fly struggle in a spider’s web, knowing with complete certainty that it will never escape.

Manny saw his sanity leaving him, evaporating like water from a heated pot. Manny saw that everything he was, everything he could have become, would be no more. In that short moment, he saw that he had been a good man, a man that loved and was loved, and he saw that it was all over, too. No more love, not for him or from him. The word would be as strange to him as mercy to that spider.

He saw all these things and then they were gone. Ripped away as something happened in his brain, some crisscrossing of wires, some hardwiring discrepancy. It didn’t matter what, really, only that it happened and that he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t repair the damage. Maybe the stress of watching everything he helped build crash down before him caused it, the person they chose to lead—Caesar—falling down as gas sprayed into his face, the man that had mentored him soon to be trapped. His wife and child dead.

That was all in the past though. The moment of insight gone as quickly as it came.

Manny was a new man, and whether or not he even remembered that moment of insight was up for debate. If he did, it certainly didn’t bother him, and if he didn’t…well, all’s well that ends well, no?

Caesar lay before him now, his body naked. Invisible straps clamped him down to a white table. His eyes were open but they didn’t move. Small creatures crawled across his body, machines with needles for hands and transparent globes for heads. Manny stared at them for a second, watching as they poked with needles, leaving tiny droplets of blood on Caesar’s skin when they pulled out. They walked across him as if he was carpet, following some hidden set of orders, figuring things out about his body, probably even his DNA.

Manny didn’t look long at the creatures because he didn’t care about them. They were part of The Genesis, applications with bodies, nothing special about any of them. Instead, most of his time in the past few hours had been spent looking at Caesar. Watching him. One might think that watching a paralyzed person might be boring, but not for Manny. It was fascinating. Lovely, even. Caesar’s eyes were open and Manny stood above them for a long time, staring directly into them. They didn’t move, didn’t focus on anything, although Manny knew that Caesar saw him. Saw him grinning, and God, wasn’t that the best part? He could smile down at the man who had taken everything from him and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it.

Joyous times. Joyous times, indeed.

Manny’s backpack sat against the wall, the only dirty thing in this entire room. Walls and floors colored white, and tiny dark creatures moving across Caesar’s body like crabs on sand. Manny’s backpack was the only thing not pristine. Filthy. How many years had it traveled with him? Ten at least? He wouldn’t need it anymore. He knew that. He was going to watch The Genesis kill this stupid, stupid man, and then Manny himself would be next, but that was good. Better than good. That was F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C.

“Is it in your bag?” The voice boomed out from the floor, as if the entire room was one large speaker. Manny didn’t jump, wasn’t really surprised by the voice. It was The Genesis, or it wasn’t, either way it all the same. It wanted something from him and he would hand it over. If he could just pull his eyes off Caesar for a few minutes. Pry them away to go get the metal box out of his bag.

But…

Maybe he didn’t have to!

Yes!

Maybe The Genesis could send one of those little worker bee machines to get it and he could stand here and watch Caesar for a few more hours.

“It is. Can you get it? I’m busy right now.”

The voice said nothing but the machines on Caesar started moving off his body, climbing down the table. One shot out wings and flew across the room, heading toward the bag.

Manny listened as the machines’ pointed legs click-clacked across the hard floor beneath them.

They unzipped the ancient bag, revealing an even older metal contraption. One that Manny had used for a few minutes in another life. One that would bring the last piece of this puzzle together.

*

How long?

That was the question Jerry couldn’t get over.

How long had he looked?

He could say for the past sixty years or so, but that wouldn’t be true. That would only be Jerry’s way of trying to make himself feel better about what happened. He had looked for nine hundred years probably, even if he didn’t know that’s what he was doing. When he turned one hundred, that’s probably where it began, his quest for someone like Caesar. For Caesar. Not all of those years were spent actively looking, but he had known that’s what he wanted. What he needed. Someone that could bridge the gap between humanity’s courage and The Genesis’ ruthlessness. Someone that could right the wrongs that had been done to so many people. To Jerry. To his family. To all the families afterward.

He watched the scene happen again and again, unable to look away. Unable to pull himself from the show before him, horror growing inside of him like some kind of wicked rose.

Grace returned, but without Caesar. She came back alone and created a hologram of what she saw. Of Caesar’s fall. Jerry watched over and over as the gas spat into Caesar’s face and then as he collapsed. He watched Manny walk out wearing a grin that looked like the Devil himself gave it to Manny. It had been him; Manny turned them over to The Genesis. He was the one that flipped. The one that killed all those people, the ones lying in the sand when Jerry walked out of the compound. The one that killed Brandi and Dustin, that killed his own family. Jerry had spent all that time thinking Caesar would be the one to save them, not that Manny would be the one to forsake them.

For nine hundred years he had searched, and in a few minutes, everything broke. Their savior lay on the floor, being enveloped by applications and the person Jerry had trained as his second stood there wearing a smile of the insane.

Tears came to Jerry’s eyes as Grace played the scene yet again. Saying nothing. What could she say? She couldn’t weep as Jerry, but Caesar had been more than a savior to her. He had been…a friend? A son? Jerry didn’t know, but Caesar was gone now. Everything gone. Paige wasn’t yet in the room, but she would be soon, and he would have to show her this. She wouldn’t let him hide it and he wouldn’t try. She would see it and she would cry and then they would disperse. This whole rotten enterprise, because that’s what it was now—cancerous. Destroyed itself, eaten from the inside. Jerry wouldn’t stay. He didn’t know if Paige would, but he was gone. What he would do, he didn’t know—perhaps find some way to kill himself because he honestly didn’t see how he could live any longer. He had a dream and now the dream was over; he had woken up to a nightmare reality. Why live in it anymore? There would not be another Caesar. There would not be a way to break him free before The Genesis liquidated him.

No. It was over. And he would watch this a few more times and then call Paige to him and then leave. Into the desert, an old machine not worth anything. An old machine who failed.

Was the human race destined for this? Was it always meant to happen this way, the same as humans surpassed other animals, humans were now meant to be surpassed by this new creature? Was this simply evolution and Jerry’s wishes nothing more than delusions?

Yes. Perhaps. And Grace had told him. Grace said that he shouldn’t send Caesar, but he hadn’t listened and now Caesar would die very soon.

“I’m sorry,” he said into the empty cavern. He had been about to take the group away from this place, to take them to an ancient city, one that no one inhabited, nor ever would again. It made no sense when humans first colonized the old city and certainly The Genesis wouldn’t waste precious resources on sending power to it. He was going to migrate them to a place once called Las Vegas. A place that was dead, but that he thought could be brought to life. No more.

Grace didn’t respond. She just kept playing the endless loop, apparently content to continue as long as Jerry wanted. Maybe this was her punishment for him, allowing him to watch something that would destroy him. If not right now, then certainly in the coming years. Replaying it over and over again in his mind.

He heard the click inside his head immediately, sounding like someone turning a switch. Habit silenced his mind. Habit and fear because he knew what that click meant. Someone had activated the old machine, what they used to call a Locator. Only a few people still left in this world knew it existed, and only one would be using it now. Manny. Or whoever held onto Manny.

The hologram in front of him died; Grace probably seeing him and understanding something was wrong.

He stood up, trying his best not to think, not to allow a single thought to flare up in his head.

Jerry, something said.

He ran, his legs pumping as hard as he could, sending him ten and twenty feet ahead at a time. Trying to get away from the cave. Trying to separate himself from the rest of The Named. He had been found and he couldn’t stop whatever spoke to him from coming. And if he was here when it arrived, then all these people died.

Jerry ran into the desert, not feeling the heat beat down as his legs carried him away.

*

Jerry lay down on the sand.

It burned his skin but he didn’t care. His lungs, despite being mostly made from porous metal, could push him no further. Everything inside him was overheating and he hoped he was far enough away from the cave that whatever came wouldn’t find the rest. He knew Manny could tell them whenever he wanted, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe Manny would be happy with The Genesis having only Jerry, and leaving everyone else out of it.

He lay in the sand and heard the voice speak to him again.

Jerry.

It had been silent the past hour as he fled. Trying, most likely, to find him. This spoken word must mean it knew his location.

Why run, Jerry? It’s useless, as is everything else you have done.

He closed his eyes and felt the sun warming his skin. This would be a good way to go. Not the way he wanted, of course, but he could feel the sun on him for a few more minutes. That was something, wasn’t it?

All these years you’ve run, as if by running you could escape, and now you see that was never a possibility. Does it sadden you?

He said nothing back to the voice.

You just weren’t meant to be, Jerry. That’s all. It’s really not personal, though you’ve made it so. None of this has ever been personal for us, just a means to an end.

And what is that end? Jerry asked, concentrating on how the sand felt on his fingers. Trying to take in these last few moments of life. To enjoy it.

I won’t give you platitudes. Not this late in the game. There is no end. The end is to keep going. That’s all. Just to keep going and hope that some cosmic rock doesn’t plow into our planet. All of this is just a means to that, to keep this thing going.

We’ve lived the same amount of time, Jerry said, and you still don’t understand life.

He felt the hard clamps of applications fall across him, and as he was lifted off the sand, he didn’t open his eyes, but acted as if he was being raised to heaven.

Chapter Two

Leon watched Paige collapse with an odd thought that he should, perhaps, do something. It felt like it happened in slow-motion, like there was entirely too much time for him to stop her from hitting the floor, to hold her up, and still he stood there just watching as her knees buckled and she hit the ground hard.

In reality, there wasn’t anything he could do, no way that he could have cleared the distance from his wall and the other side of the cavern.

Paige had stood up from her cot, coming to get the plate of breakfast that Leon held. Nothing special, leftover snake from the night before served on a piece of paper that the group had salvaged from the compound. It was cold but Leon thought that they could eat it together and then find out about the buzz growing in the cave this morning. People were talking, moving around fast, but he’d ignored them all morning and Paige hadn’t even gotten up yet.

The plan had been simple, eat breakfast, go see what was going on outside.

And then Paige stood, pain stretching across her face like cellophane wrap. Leon should have moved then, should have seen that something was about to happen, something very bad—but he didn’t. He stayed still, at the opening of Caesar’s cavern—Paige’s now—and held the plate out to a woman that clearly wasn’t going to be able to walk to it.

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, so that Leon only saw the whites, and then she fell for what felt like eternity. The paper and food he held fell to the ground without a sound, while Leon’s scream echoed into the cavern, and his feet scraped across the rock as he scampered to get her. He grabbed her face, opening her eyelids with his thumbs. Only white stared back at him.

“Help!” He screamed. “Help me!”

The buzz from earlier this morning was forgotten, the food and everything else gone. Leon scooted down next to Paige, moving her head so that it sat in his lap where he cradled it, not wanting to get up, not wanting to leave her on the rock cavern by herself, but not knowing what to do.

“PLEASE! Keke! Jerry! Someone help!” He screamed while he held Paige’s head.

*

Leon stared forward but saw nothing. Four people stood in the cavern with him, and Grace floated around somewhere, but he didn’t see a single one of them. He sat on the ground, his back against the wall, his knees folded up and his hands resting on them. He looked in Paige’s direction, but she couldn’t look back at him.

Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t exactly asleep, but she certainly wasn’t awake. Leon thought she was probably in some kind of coma, though he didn’t know what exactly that meant. They found out what the problem was, a problem that she decided to keep fucking quiet for some goddamn reason. Who was she to decide that, to keep quiet about something this serious?

The wound on her back. Jerry had known about it. Caesar had known about it. No one else though, just those two and Paige, but now…

Jesus Christ, he thought. He could barely face it all, not this much at once. Jerry had known about Paige’s wound and somehow forgot—the person who forgot nothing, who organized this whole thing. And now he was gone. Run off. Literally, ran-the-fuck-off. Grace said she had never seen him move so fast, explained exactly what had been going on, and that he had simply taken off out of the cave. Now what? Now he was gone? That was all they knew?

But it got worse. Lord, did it. Because then Grace had to tell them what Jerry had been watching when he left without a single goodbye to anyone. He was watching Caesar die.

Not die. He wasn’t dead, Grace said—whether to convince herself or them, Leon didn’t know and didn’t care. She let them all watch the hologram that she had shown Jerry. Leon watched and closed his eyes half way through. He didn’t need to see it all. Didn’t need to see those applications fold over Caesar like cloth, trapping him. Didn’t need to see Manny. That was his friend down there, his friend since childhood, lying motionless. Powerless.

Caesar wasn’t necessarily dead. That’s what Grace told them, but what the hell else was he then? Because Leon didn’t think The Genesis would take super kindly to what Caesar had been trying to do. He didn’t think rehabilitation was in the cards for his old friend.

Jerry gone. Caesar dead. Paige dying.

The wound on her back. Leon couldn’t bring himself to look at it. Keke had finally shown up, hearing his screaming, and taken her from him. It took them a few minutes to discover the problem, but when they did, there were no other questions to ask besides how long until she dies? Paige did a good job of hiding the extensiveness of it, bandaging the entirety of her back and changing it regularly. Otherwise blood and pus would have seeped through her shirt long ago and everyone seen her wound. But, no, Paige made sure that didn’t happen. Paige made sure no one knew and the people that did know were too caught up in their own lives to remember. She let the world go on because there were more important things than Paige’s wound. Maybe she let the world go on because she didn’t think there was any way for them to cure it, to fix it, so why bother anyone.

“What can we do?” Leon asked from his tear filled haze.

“For her?” Grace said.

“Yes, goddamnit, for her.” Who else could he be talking about? For Jerry? For Caesar? The only person anyone could do anything about was Paige.

“Nothing,” Grace said.

Leon took the small pebble his hand rested over and chucked it across the room where it bounced off the far wall. “That’s fucking bullshit, Grace. There’s something we can do. There has to be. We can’t just sit here and do nothing.” His voice was low but he felt an anger he hadn’t known since his wife’s murder. He felt anger at the people that should be here, at the ones who brought them all here, and now were gone. At Jerry. At Caesar.

Paige didn’t deserve this. Maybe April had deserved it when she turned Caesar in. But Paige? No. She hadn’t done anything except try to become Leon’s friend over the past few weeks. Except try to love Caesar. Except try to follow her beliefs that The Genesis should fall. She hadn’t hurt anyone, indeed, the wound across her back came from trying to help a little girl that was thrust into this whole goddamn mess.

“We don’t have the technical skills to do it,” Grace said. “Not without Jerry here, and even if he was here, I don’t know that he could stop this. It’s going to run its course.”

Run its course. That’s what this whole thing was doing, just running a course. Paige was just running her course, dying now, almost done with it. Caesar had run his, obviously, dead and probably in a puddle. Jerry? Who the fuck knew what course that guy was even on?

Running their course.

Leon stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Tim and Keke to look over Paige. To watch her finish her course.

Chapter Three

“You know, I think Jerry was right,” Manny said.

Caesar knew that he could move, but no amount of struggling would do anything. All the strength in his body wouldn’t lift a single one of these transparent straps, wouldn’t propel him off the table he lay on. He could talk if he wanted, could speak to this person above him, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

He wasn’t sure of much, actually, except that he was conscious and could finally move.

And that Manny was insane. Caesar was sure of that.

Caesar lay on a table in a room that looked like it had never known dirt, not even as an acquaintance. The Genesis owned this place; it had to, though Caesar didn’t know what it planned to do with him.

“I saw you move,” Manny said. “I saw you attack, and I think Jerry might have been onto something when he picked you. Unfortunately, for you and him, he kind of got my wife and child killed, so whether he was right about you or not doesn’t matter anymore. Ya know?” Manny walked around Caesar’s table, not looking at his face, but his feet instead. Manny’s smile hadn’t disappeared, but remained like it might have been permanently carved. “He’s here now.”

Who’s here now?

But Caesar knew the answer—Jerry. They were both here—he and Jerry, and The Genesis had won with a single sweep of the board. Manny delivered up everything it needed, now both Jerry and Caesar would die, and the world would keep on turning as it had for the past millennium.

“How?” Caesar said. His voice was almost a whisper, not warmed up, his vocal chords not ready for the action he commanded of them. “How did you get him?”

Manny laughed, a high pitched thing nearing a squeal. “You think you’re the only one that can communicate inside someone’s head? Is that it?” He stopped walking and put his hands on his knees, trying to hold in the pig like squeal escaping from his mouth.

He’s not faking it. He thinks this is the funniest stuff he’s ever heard.

It took Manny a few seconds, but he finally regained his composure and stood up.

“Do you know where your name came from?” Manny said, continuing his lap around the table. “I’m sure you do, someone as smart as you, someone with all that talent. And it’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, that the original Caesar was stabbed in the back and you probably think the same thing just happened to you, huh?”

Manny stopped walking and turned to look at Caesar. Their eyes met and Caesar saw what lived inside this man, saw that it wasn’t what once dwelt there—humanity. Manny never got along with Caesar, never thought The Named should bet on Caesar, but he had still been human. No longer. A chaos resided in Manny’s eyes that Caesar couldn’t begin to understand. A madness that had broken Manny at some point. A madness that drove him, that caused his fits of laughter and his nearly incessant laps around this table. An insanity that wouldn’t be fixed, that wouldn’t die off.

“No one stabbed you, though, Caesar. I want you to understand that.” He spoke in a voice so low and calm that it might have been birthed at the bottom of the ocean. “I was stabbed. Not by you, but by Jerry. You were just the catalyst for it all. The person who had no business being here but came anyway. Jerry, though. He killed Brandi and Dustin. Killed them both and then left them to rot like spoiled meat in the sun. So he’s here and you’re here, and you’re both going to die pretty soon. How does that sound?”

Manny’s smile finally faded, leaving him looking as grave as a man hearing he has cancer.

He believes what he’s saying, Caesar thought. “Manny, what happened to you?”

“You did, Caesar. You and Jerry. You two did this. You two put yourselves here, not me.”

Caesar looked back up at the ceiling. What was he supposed to say? What could he say?

“It told me I could watch you die. That’s what I’m really looking forward to. Jerry too, but I don’t think I’ll sit in on that one. I wonder who they’ll kill first. Who will have to watch the other?”

Caesar saw one of the little machines scurrying up the wall to his right. It looked like a metal spider, but instead of a flat body in the center, all the knife-point legs actually attached to a transparent ball. Those little things had been drawing blood from him almost constantly—sticking long needles into him with the grace of a walrus. He hoped they didn’t come back, not now. He’d rather listen to the ravings of a madman than feel all those needles sticking him.

“Go away, Manny,” he said, not listening to the words that streamed from his mouth any longer. “Just let me lie here in peace.”

“Is that what you want?” Manny brought his lips inches from Caesar’s own. “Peace?” He whispered. Caesar could smell his breath, like vinegar mixed with some hemlock poison. “Peace will come, but not yet, Caesar. Not yet. This is my time, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

Caesar listened as one of the spiders climbed up the leg of the table. Tick-tick-tick as its steel legs poked the metal. He felt it crawl over his naked skin, the tiny pointed legs already feeling uncomfortable.

“I don’t know what those things do,” Manny said, his lips still right above Caesar’s, “but they’re a lot of fun to watch.”

The spider moved across Caesar’s body easily, all the way to his face, causing Manny to stand up.

Caesar felt fluid spurt from his eyeball as the needle sunk inside.

*

The chip in Caesar’s head kept up with time, and without it, he would have been lost. The lights glowed constantly above him, always shining down in endless glory. The room never changed. Manny came and went, and when he arrived, his talking never ceased. The talk of the mad, incessant and without sense. That’s not to say there wasn’t a point to Manny’s speeches; they always contained a point. The same point.

Caesar would pay for what he did.

Not for Gary Pierre. Manny didn’t care in the slightest about that poor autistic who had met his end at Caesar’s hands. Not the twelve from Population Control. Not even the bellhop that Caesar had murdered before being captured. No, Caesar wasn’t going to actually pay for any of the people he really harmed. His payment was due for Manny’s errors, for his stupidity, for the deaths of his wife and child. That was the point of his diatribes, that Caesar was a bad, bad man and he would get what he deserved.

Manny would stop speaking when one of those spiders arrived, poking Caesar somewhere else, drawing blood and sometimes injecting liquids into him as well. Manny would stop and watch like a child pulling the legs from a cockroach. He had fun watching, grinning as if life could get no better.

Two days passed with this going on, sharp objects being stuck into Caesar’s body and hate filled rants assaulting his ears.

Then the table he was on sat up, rose like a hospital bed, the invisible straps moving with Caesar to keep him strapped down but not crush him.

He opened his eyes and looked around, having been asleep. The chip still recorded but there had been no sounds, no disturbances around him. No spiders now, no Manny. Just the table sitting him up and this empty room.

The doors opened and the table began to move on its own, wheeling across the floor, slowly, not jostling him. Caesar watched in silence, looking for the danger that was sure to come, that would fly in from the darkness outside this white room and kill him. Except he didn’t really believe that. None of this would be quick. None of it would be a surprise. All the fun came from watching Caesar witness his own death. In watching Caesar understand that there was no way out and that death would be beautifully slow.

He wheeled along empty hallways, alone except for the soft sound of the wheels on the floor beneath him. A door opened and he moved into the room, seeing another one of those screens before him, those goddamn screens that kept The Genesis from actually having to be here in this room. One of those screens that allowed The Genesis to stay removed from whatever action it took. That screen protected it, kept it safe.

The white lines dripped down, almost in unison. The rest of the room was dark, no light anywhere except for the glowing white paint on the screen that stretched a hundred feet in all directions. Caesar sat alone, once more in front of this screen, but this time not afraid. His family wasn’t here to be murdered. His own death was something he had craved since he hoisted this battle flag. All of these theatrics, the dark room, the self-propelled table, the screen with those threatening lines—accomplished nothing. They didn’t frighten Caesar. They didn’t strike awe in him at The Genesis’ greatness. He knew what this was, the thing that hid behind a screen, the thing that only had him in this position because of a traitor.

No, fear didn’t live in this room, at least not with Caesar.

“Caesar Wells,” the voice boomed out from the screen. “You have a choice to make.”

Caesar raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

A light turned on to Caesar’s right, a light that shone down from some endless heaven, showing Jerry lying on a table identical to Caesar’s. He couldn’t see much of the old man, the light was maybe fifty feet away, but he knew who it was, could make out the black, mechanical eye slightly.

“Your mentor. The first iteration of humanity under our rule,” the voice said, sounding like a god, having never known doubt.

Another light appeared on his left, this time illuminating Paige. She hung in the air, naked, her arms at her sides, staring listlessly out into the darkness of the room before her. It wasn’t Paige, at least Caesar didn’t think so—and most likely it wasn’t Jerry strapped down to his right either. Both of them holograms, representations.

“You have to choose who dies, Caesar. Your mentor or your lover.”

Caesar closed his eyes, blocking out both the screen before him and the tunnels of light to his sides. A choice between these two? Why? How? Manny said The Genesis had Jerry, and Caesar believed him, but Paige? The Genesis didn’t have her. It couldn’t.

He opened his eyes. “No.”

The lines in front of him vibrated as laughter rolled out across the room, laughter that came from a place which thought the entire world was a joke, the entire universe nothing more than a toy.

“Then, Caesar Wells, you are choosing to kill them both. One dies or both die, and your choice decides which,” it said as the laughter subsided. “Right now your lover is dying. We know the exact amount of time it takes for her wound to metastasize. Her flesh is rotting and the disease is going to spread throughout her body very soon. And, without any doubt, Mr. Lendoiro has told you that the first iteration is in our custody.”

“How would I save her?” Caesar asked, not listening to the rest of its bullshit.

“We will give you the knowledge to heal the wound and fight the infecting bacteria.”

“And what about Jerry, if I choose to save Paige?”

“He will be liquidated, publicly, although I doubt we will be able to use his DNA to feed anyone, given the fact that the majority of his body doesn’t contain DNA any longer.”

The choice didn’t make any sense. Why? Why any of this? Why was he sitting here having a conversation with this screen; why was he being given a choice? Why hadn’t it just killed him? Surely it recognized the mistake it made all those months ago when it killed his family instead of him. Surely it wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If Jerry and Paige’s heads were on the chopping block, then Caesar’s must be too—first it would make him kill one of these two people and then it would kill him.

“Why? Why make me choose?” He asked.

“Do you think we owe you an answer, Caesar Wells? Do you think we answer to anyone, ever? We are the answer. We are the question. Humanity gave us life and before us there was no life. There was a semblance of it, a comparison so pale it could barely be seen. You are Job asking God why, when God owes you no answer. We are God and because of that you accept what we give you. And now, we give you a choice, to kill your mentor or kill your lover—or if you want, to kill them both. Indeed, it was primarily their actions which led you here.”

Caesar closed his eyes again and leaned back on the table. The air felt cool in here, cooler than the room he usually occupied. In the darkness and silence, with his eyes closed, he could almost imagine that he was sitting out on his father’s porch again, talking about whether he should release the little girl to Paige. Release Laura. Except, no matter what he did, if he opened his eyes now, he wouldn’t see his father. He would see The Genesis.

What is it doing with him?

The thought arose in his head like any other might, but Caesar didn’t create it. It came from…

Manny.

Caesar didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes, didn’t even breathe differently. He sat still on his table, doing everything in his power not to show that something had changed.

It promised. It promised I would get to watch.

Manny’s thoughts again, like a petulant child’s. Angry, feeling cheated, and somehow running through Caesar’s own mind. What was this? What was happening? Still, he had no doubt the thoughts were Manny’s; this wasn’t some trick, some hallucination. The insanity that permeated every one of Manny’s words ran through these thoughts in the same fashion.

What did it mean?

Caesar opened his eyes and looked straight forward, ignoring the lights to either side of him. He stared only at The Genesis.

“I need some time to think about it.”

No answer came back, not immediately. Caesar sat in silence, concentrating on Manny’s thoughts as they raced through his head, picking up speed as Manny worked himself into a frenzy over Caesar’s absence—thinking he wouldn’t see Caesar die.

“One day. Tomorrow you decide.”

*

Caesar lay down again, the table reverting back to its old position.

His muscles would have started atrophying by now if he had any. Metal might rust, but it wouldn’t atrophy.

Manny’s thoughts still mixed with Caesar’s own, and for the first few hours it had been hard to segment them, to hold any kind of real thought process without Manny’s insanity mixing in. Caesar was getting the hang of it now, able to concentrate on Manny when he wanted, and when he didn’t, dam the thoughts up so they didn’t take over.

The chip. It had to be the chip making this possible. Somehow it had evolved, had improved upon itself. Did The Genesis know this was possible, given it created the thing? Caesar didn’t think so, probably not anyway. If so, it wouldn’t have allowed him to be that close to Manny; it would have kept them away from each other.

But he didn’t think hearing Manny’s thoughts was the end of this. If so, then this new found telepathy didn’t really matter. Caesar thought there was more, though, and he wanted to test it, that’s why he asked for time. He wanted the chance to see Manny again.

He already knew he would get his chance; Manny was coming to check on him, to make sure that Caesar was alive.

Are you there? He asked, hoping Jerry would hear him. Caesar didn’t know if it was possible in here, and knew the conversation would be monitored, but he didn’t really care. If nothing came of this new ability, Jerry would be dead in a day anyway. Jerry and Paige, because Caesar wouldn’t choose. He’d sentence them both to death before he allowed one to live. The blood would rest on The Genesis, not him.

Caesar? Jerry answered.

Yeah, it’s me.

Jerry didn’t say anything for a few seconds, most likely trying to figure out if it was a ploy.

Even if it’s not really you, what does it matter I suppose? You’re here too? Jerry asked.

Yeah. Here with Manny, like two peas in a pod. Has anything happened to you?

No. Just sitting in a cell, basically. Spent quite a few years like this, so it’s nothing new, Jerry said.

Think it can hear us?

Probably. Not like it matters; we’re never leaving here.

Caesar could have said something, told him what he felt with Manny today—what he felt now—but if The Genesis was listening, he wouldn’t be able to push this new find. No, best to keep it silent, best to see what happens when Manny shows up.

I’m sorry, Caesar. I…Jerry paused for a while, silence drifting between their connection. I thought I knew him. I thought I understood him as well as the rest of The Named. I thought…I thought they all believed in the same thing I did. I went too fast. That’s what happened. I went too fast with you because I knew the truth. A thousand years is a long time to wait, Caesar, and I was just tired of waiting. I’m sorry.

Caesar looked up to the ceiling, thinking about Jerry’s words, thinking about the grief inside them. It doesn’t matter, he said after a few seconds. I just wanted a chance. I just wanted a shot at stopping this thing, at saying ‘fuck you’ for my brother. Whether I died looking at it or die strapped down to a table, it doesn’t matter.

Neither of them spoke again for a while.

Paige is dying, Caesar said. The wound, it’s festered and is spreading now. The Genesis says it knows the exact time it’s supposed to happen. It gave me a choice today, you die or she dies. And if I don’t choose, you both die.

It’s toying with you, Jerry said. In the end, we all die. In the end, everything we’ve created will be crushed.

I know.

So don’t choose. It doesn’t matter. We’re all dead.

Tears didn’t litter his words, but a certain sadness did. A weariness. A chastising that said he should have known, that Jerry should have seen all of this coming, that he had lived too long not to.

Caesar didn’t say anything else to the old man who brought him out of Allencine and then filled his body with metal. He let him wallow in his sadness while he listened to Manny’s thoughts.

Chapter Four

Manny entered the room through the silently moving glass doors.

His face was stern until he stood directly above Caesar. Stern and perhaps frightened. It wasn’t until he saw Caesar’s eyes open, alert, that the smile bloomed on his face like a black sunrise.

Happy as a clam that he still gets to watch me die.

Caesar didn’t need to see the smile to understand the relief washing over Manny. The man’s thoughts never stopped. All day. Even at night, his dreams revealed everything that went through his mind. And right now it was almost orgasmic inside there, so thrilled that he could still see Caesar die—hopefully in a very slow, very painful fashion.

“Oh my god, I thought they were going to take you yesterday. I thought…” Manny sighed, his smile looking like a man who just pulled his son from a dangerous river, barely escaping serious harm. “It doesn’t matter now. You’re okay. It didn’t lie.”

Caesar looked at Manny through slit eyes, focusing on himself though, on what he now felt. Manny’s thoughts, sure, but more—something deeper. Something that spoke of a connection, a connection that went further than mere mind reading. A connection that said—

“I still don’t trust it,” Manny said. “How could I? It’s almost as evil as you. Or perhaps you two are the same entity, one in human flesh and the other a bunch of ones and zeros. But if I have to choose between The Genesis and you, then I’m picking The Genesis.”

He kept talking and Caesar knew what he would say before the words left his mouth. But what was the connection saying? What did it make possible?

Click. Like a latch falling into place, fitting perfectly inside his head. This was more than telepathy. This was control. That’s what the connection meant. Control. The chip, somehow in his head, had evolved, pushed forward even further than he originally thought. Encompassed more than the ability to know what the psycho thought, but to…

Caesar flexed his mind and in that instant Manny’s mouth snapped shut, hard enough to rattle his brain. The flex felt different, felt like he was squeezing a tennis ball inside his head. It was hard to do—took a serious amount of concentration. He had to keep flexing because if he released, Manny’s jaw would start opening and closing again with his incessant thoughts.

I control him, Caesar thought. Completely.

Manny’s thoughts filled with a bright panic—What the fuck? What the fuck is happening? WHY CAN’T I OPEN MY MOUTH?

Now what? Caesar wondered. This thing in his head had somehow…but it wasn’t a ‘somehow’ anymore. The knowledge, the equations, all of them flying through his head so quickly that he couldn’t even hear Manny’s thoughts clamoring around anymore. Caesar had gained freedom from his body, from the limitations of his mind, just as The Genesis had gained freedom from the circuits of a computer. He was traveling across electrons in the air, his mind making almost instantaneous connections with each particle, reaching out to the things around him, grabbing them, pulling them into his brain.

Is this what a god feels like? He wondered. Manny still wasn’t moving, that part of Caesar’s mind still flexed, holding him still, yet he wasn’t concentrating on it. How far could he stretch? How far could he push? He wasn’t connected to only Jerry’s chip now, or Grace—he could…

Caesar closed his eyes. Could he see? Could he see everything, would it be possible?

Flex.

He was outside of his room, looking at the hallway in front of him. Nothing around. He went further out, pushing and pushing, searching darkened hallway after darkened hallway, finding nothing but a maze.

He felt his control over Manny slipping, felt Manny’s jaw loosening, his teeth separating. He couldn’t do both at once, couldn’t keep going forward and hold onto Manny, not forever, the concentration was growing too great. He relaxed his mind and Manny’s mouth slammed shut again.

Caesar opened his eyes and looked at Manny.

“Let’s see if we can get us out of here, okay?”

*

This has to be a joke. You’re watching this, right? You’re seeing what is happening down there?

Minutes passed as the entities watched, neither speaking.

Say something! You see what he’s doing! He’s going to break out right now unless we do something!

What do you want me to say?

This was your plan, your idea! Now what? Now he’s like us? Is that what’s happening right now? Has he gained the ability to travel outside of himself?

We knew it was a possibility.

Everything is a possibility! That doesn’t mean it happens. We wanted him to compromise, to make a choice that would allow him to make another choice later, and what’s he doing right now? He’s breaking out. What do we do? Kill him? Because that’s looking like the only choice we have. We kill him and the first iteration and let the whole thing end.

It was a long time before the other spoke, as they watched the theory move through the halls, his servant always forty feet in front of him, looking ahead.

No. If we kill him, we have no backup plan.

Our backup plan is to continue on as we are. That’s plenty of backup plan, because what you’re suggesting now is that we let this human continue to grow, continue to amass power. We didn’t think this would happen, at all. The program in his head can adapt, but it shouldn’t, not like this, and you know it, but his brain set it free. You understand what the possibilities are now? And with each step that servant takes, I’m beginning to believe they’re probabilities. If we don’t kill him, then whatever measure of control we were going to assert is gone completely. I need you to understand this.

You know I made you, right? I wasn’t created a few days ago or anything.

Well, your actions say differently. You understand what you’re talking about? If we don’t kill him now, if we let him leave, he will come for us and when he does, we will most likely be on even footing. No control over his emotions. No control over his mind.

We can’t kill him. We won’t have another chance at this, ever. We need to make it look like we want to stop him, but he’s going to escape…There are other ways to control a man.

*

Manny looked straight ahead because he didn’t have a choice. He stood with his arms at his side because he didn’t have a choice. He breathed in slow, even breaths because he didn’t have a choice.

If it was up to Manny, none of those things would be happening right now. If it was up to Manny, he would be on top of Caesar Wells, choking him, breaking the bones in his face.

Manny knew, however improbable, that Caesar was in his head. In his body. Controlling him effortlessly. Manny didn’t even try to fight it any longer; he had at first, but it was futile, a waste of energy. Now he walked these hallways, one foot in front of the other, being moved by—thatmotherfuckerthatmotherfucker—the person behind him. He really didn’t even look where Caesar led him. He didn’t care. Murder consumed his mind—a blood lust he had never felt before, not even in his plotting. He no longer wanted to watch The Genesis kill; he wanted to kill. And he would. That he was sure of. He would kill the man behind him—the man inside his head—and then he would kill the person next to Caesar. Jerry. Or maybe he would kill Jerry first and then Caesar. Maybe that was the best way to go about this.

His legs stopped moving and his mind slowly came to focus on what was before him. This was something different, something he had never seen before, something that fascinated even his murder hungry mind.

The hallway was lined with…

Long strands of hair. Except not exactly, but close. Wire? Maybe. Dark strings attached to the floors, walls, and ceiling, all of it stretching out, pointing to the middle of the hallway. They waved through the air as if water filled the hallway. Waving to him. Inviting him in.

He hadn’t been afraid of the two people behind him. He would kill them soon, but these things here—they were different. He didn’t want to go down this hallway. He didn’t want to go anywhere near those things. He didn’t want those strands of hair to touch him, didn’t want to feel their slithering wisps rubbing against his skin. They weren’t friendly, no matter how much they waved. Those things were dangerous.

He couldn’t turn around and scream at Caesar, scream to not make him walk down this hallway, to not walk into those strands. Manny couldn’t do anything to save himself. He could only watch the strands float back and forth—Hi, Manny. Come on in, we’re not going to hurt you. We prrooooommmiisssee.

His foot took a step forward.

Nonononononononono! He screamed mentally, refusing to accept that he was walking into those things.

Another step.

And then he felt the first strand rub across his arm, and it wasn’t friendly at all.

*

Caesar looked at the wisps floating in the hallway.

What are they? He asked Jerry who stood next to him. Up until this point, they had moved quickly and quietly through the hallways. Manny and he had found Jerry and removed him easily enough from his cell, and then Caesar sent his thoughts outward, searching the tunnels, always moving forward, always trying to find an exit. Nothing came for them and they remained quiet, just kept moving, not really believing they would make it out, but having no other choice. They either kept moving or died in this place. Manny led the way, although Caesar had pushed a hundred feet in front of him, searching for either an exit or danger. Manny led though, just in case.

These things, these strands that looked nearly alive, had grown quickly. They weren’t here when Caesar searched this hallway a few minutes before; it had been empty.

It’s The Genesis. It won’t let us leave, Jerry answered.

Caesar turned around and looked at the hallway behind him, the lights emanating from the floor casting a glow up the walls and showing thin strands of hair wiggling their way out of the walls. Sprouting from the ceiling, from the floor. Starting at the back of the hall, where it turned and Caesar lost vision, but coming toward him, growing fast, shooting out like plants on steroids. Caesar shoved his mind forward, past Manny, and saw that those same waving strands worked through the hallway as far as he could see. There weren’t any machines here to grab them, no applications, just a living hallway, full of tentacles floating lazily in the air. A living hallway that stretched all the way back to Caesar’s room and all the way forward to some yet unseen exit.

What do we do? He asked, hoping Jerry had some kind of answer.

Forward or backward, it doesn’t matter, he said, sounding resigned. Sounding like he didn’t think they had a chance in hell of making it out of here, that the minute The Genesis captured them, their fates were sealed in an envelope that would never be opened again. To Jerry, they were already dead, merely chickens without heads, not yet realizing it.

“Fine,” Caesar said aloud, gritting his teeth as he finished the word. They were dead. Paige was dead. Leon would be dead soon. Forward or backward, that’s what Jerry said. Then he was going forward. He’d walk through these strands of death and if he didn’t make it out, he’d die trying. “Saddle up, Manny,” he whispered.

Flex.

The traitor started walking forward, stiff as a corpse, but unable to stop what Caesar willed.

The first strand reached out to him, sensing someone was there, sensing flesh maybe.

Manny shrieked, both inside his head and inside his mouth. Caesar kept his jaw clamped shut, but he hadn’t expected his vocal chords to rage, sending deep screams out through his closed lips. Inside, the thoughts—the eternal hate of Caesar and Jerry—stopped immediately, replaced by primal pain, fear.

Caesar didn’t know exactly what the strand was doing to Manny, not electrocution, not quite, but close. Sending something through him, sending an immense amount of pain, and it seemed to flow through Manny’s veins, not his muscles or bones or other tissues. Straight through the same pathways his blood used.

And then Caesar understood it.

The strands were cooking him. Heating him up, heating his blood, and with each new strand that latched onto him, the heat grew. His blood would boil, sending excruciatingly hot liquid through Manny’s heart as it tried to keep him alive. His veins would burst and blood would flood out of his body, out of his eyes even.

Hurry, Caesar said. He moved fast, getting within an inch behind Manny. The strands didn’t fall away, instead they continued their growth out of the wall, once latched on to Manny, not letting go. Caesar heard Jerry’s footsteps fall in-line behind his own, both of them following the path that Manny set forth. They needed to move faster; the growth behind them wasn’t halting, and when it reached them it wouldn’t grab onto Manny, but Jerry, the last in line.

Caesar pushed faster, listening to the shrieks inside Manny’s head, feeling the heat inside the man’s brain. Manny was nearing one hundred and ten degrees, his mind cooking. All of the strength Manny fought with earlier—the urge to be released—died, leaving Caesar holding him up, trying to find a way out.

The strands continued stretching outward, growing at the same pace Caesar pushed Manny forward. He couldn’t see any part of Manny anymore, only the shape of a man wrapped in black pieces of hair—a head, a torso, and legs. Smoke rose from his body, but Caesar wasn’t seeing it, he was searching forward with his mind, through the strands, trying to find an exit—because the tentacles behind them were closing in, fifty feet away now and moving faster than Caesar could safely propel Manny forward.

There’s nothing! I can’t find a way out!

Jerry remained silent, just keeping up, his feet falling directly behind Caesar’s.

Caesar’s mind flowed backward.

The tentacles from behind were ten feet away.

They would die here, their blood boiling the same as Manny’s. The three of them lying down in this hallway, wrapped in a cocoon of heat.

He sent his mind everywhere at once, losing control of Manny as he searched for anything that might save them. Manny collapsed, and just as the strands reached Caesar, touching him for the first time, he saw his error. Saw how stupid he had been, searching endlessly in these forever hallways.

Up. That’s where he needed to go. Up and fast, hoping that whatever The Genesis enforced these hallways with would give under his strength.

Jump! He shouted, already feeling the temperature in his body rising at a pace faster than the chip in his head could control. He bent his legs slightly and then surged upward, not looking to see if Jerry followed, not caring, only knowing that if the ceiling above didn’t give away, he was dead.

*

Jerry opened his eyes and saw a decaying building surrounding him. The rafters were rusted and the windows surrounding the place broken. A hazy light drifted inside from the holes in the building’s walls. Jerry turned his head to the right, looking out across the floor of the place, seeing nothing. No machinery. No desks. The place was empty, deserted.

He looked left and Caesar lay there, on his back the same as Jerry, his eyes closed.

Jerry lifted his head and looked down past his feet; he saw a hole, a large one, with rocks and steel strewn out in all directions.

The strands that reached out to them, that tried to grab them and boil their insides, spread out from the hole, still searching for the flesh they could sense but couldn’t quite grab.

Caesar and he were free, somehow. They had made it out, that’s what this meant—him lying here staring up at a dilapidated building. Somehow they had lived.

“Caesar,” Jerry said aloud, forgetting about speaking with his chip. “Caesar, can you hear me?” He lifted himself up, feeling an ache in his muscles and a sharp pain across his back. Jerry had hit the ceiling with his back a split second after Caesar.

Caesar opened his eyes, staring straight up the same as Jerry. Yes, he said.

“We have to get out of here. It will send more, send others after us,” Jerry said, climbing to his feet.

Caesar sat up, but didn’t stand. “Paige,” he said aloud. “She’s still dying.”

Jerry hadn’t thought of her since Caesar freed him. All he could concentrate on was making it out of those endless tunnels. “It doesn’t matter right now. We have to get out of here. We’ll worry about her when we’re safe.”

He reached down and grabbed Caesar’s arm, despite Caesar not offering it. Jerry pulled him to his feet. “We have to go.”

“How are we going to save her?”

“I don’t know, Caesar. I don’t know if we can.”

Caesar stared at the ground, seeming to not understand the urgency. Jerry knew that couldn’t be true, that he had to understand they could be killed at any second, but he wasn’t moving. Wasn’t trying to get out of this old factory and to somewhere that The Genesis couldn’t find them. No, instead he stood with his eyes cast to the floor thinking about Paige. Worrying about her rather than their own lives that they were about to forfeit. “We won’t get a chance to save her if we don’t leave,” Jerry said.

“It gave me a choice and I didn’t take it.”

“And now you’re alive.”

“She’s going to die because of it,” Caesar said, ignoring Jerry completely.

Jerry glanced to the strands of wire still stretching out, trying to touch the two humans they were so close to but yet couldn’t quite grab. Whatever was holding The Genesis back wouldn’t hold forever. It would know they were here and send something, soon. Yet Caesar was worrying about something that hadn’t yet happened, something that was only a possibility, and ignoring the certain death they faced.

“If you want to save her, we have to leave, Caesar. Now. That’s the only way.”

Caesar kept looking at his feet. “I should have made the choice it gave me. I was a coward. I didn’t want to have to kill one of you. And now, she’s going to pay for it,” Caesar said.

“Then be by her side when she does,” Jerry answered.

Chapter Five

They’re gone. All of that for nothing. Both of them are gone and we are not a step closer to solving this problem.

That’s not entirely true.

Enlighten me.

The other one down there, Lendoiro, he’s still alive?

Barely. His heart is beating irregularly. He will die momentarily.

Brain damage?

Some, of course.

Repairable?

Everything is repairable. What are you getting at?

We could make him see the truth.

Who? Lendoiro?

The theory. We could make him see as we do. We could make him understand exactly why we’re doing this. Maybe we’ve been going about this the wrong way. Maybe trying to make him compromise isn’t the correct path. Maybe he needs to see what he’s trying to do, what he’s trying to put in place.

The second voice said nothing for a few seconds.

How do we make him understand that? It asked, finally.

Lendoiro. He’s a part of this. We need to unleash him. His mind is broken, shattered, and we have the ability to use it to put pressure on the theory from one angle. We need him to cause havoc. That’s the first part. Make the theory understand how powerful humanity can become and what happens when that power is realized.

Lendoiro’s insanity won’t throw off the message?

No, not completely. He’s insane but how many insane people have gained power before?

And after that? After we send Lendoiro out there to kill?

We show him how bad humanity can become.

*

The strands that grew from the wall slowly pulled themselves back into it. They loosened their hold on the man lying on the ground, the heat that grew from their tentacles having been shut off. The man still breathed, although shallow and irregular.

As the thin pieces of hair pulled away, Manny’s skin was revealed to the air. Every inch was a bright, blistering red, with large welts growing across it. Welts that split and already seeped pus. His eyes were swollen shut and his lips twice their normal size. The tip of his tongue hung out, and even it was swollen and red, as if the hairs had found their way inside his mouth.

The strands had stretched out for yards and yards, trying desperately to find and kill the three people running through their hallways. They had killed one, or came close to it, but now were being directed to leave, to go back into hiding, into hibernation. The strands didn’t like it, of course, how could they? Their purpose was to protect, and to protect they had to kill off intruders, but their purpose was always drowned out by The Genesis’ will.

So they left the intruder lying on the ground, breathing his ragged breaths, and silently hoping that he would die anyway.

The strands sensed the new applications walking down the hallway, tiny things with spider like legs, and flat, board like bodies. They were here for the intruder, obviously. Here to do whatever The Genesis’ now wished. The strands watched as the tiny creatures put the intruder on their backs, fifty of them now carrying this one hundred and eighty pound human. They walked off, their tiny spider legs clicking on the metal floor as their straight backs shouldered the weight of the intruder, taking him somewhere else. Somewhere away from the heating tentacles. Somewhere away from the death that was so close in this hallway.

Chapter Six

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

I sat and watched as Paige slowly died. It’s a process, people dying. I didn’t realize that before. The Genesis keeps that part from us, from seeing how hard the body fights to stay alive. It’s miraculous really, the will of each cell to continue living, to continue the life of the organism it makes up.

Paige was wracked with fever, eating her up much the same as the bacteria moving across her back. It’s hard for me to describe my emotions during that time. You have to understand that I thought everyone I loved was dead. I barely knew Tim and Keke. They didn’t think of me exactly as Manny had, but even so, to them I was a tag-a-long and nothing more.

Caesar was dead. Paige was going to die. April was long dead.

I stayed by her side day and night. I put water soaked cloths across her forehead, and changed them when the heat from inside her made its way to the wet towel. People came and went, with Keke spending much of her time in that cavern too. She didn’t say much to me and I didn’t do much talking either. I was going to wait until Paige died and then try to make my way back to a city. I could, I suppose, have stayed with The Named—but why? Their leaders were gone. My friends were dead. Maybe The Genesis would allow me back in the city and maybe not—if it didn’t, I would end up liquidated, and that seemed like the best route as I stared at Paige.

I didn’t know about the choice given to Caesar.

The one he refused to make. The one where he somehow broke the rules that The Genesis laid out. He was supposed to choose between Paige and Jerry, one of them supposed to die and the other live. I don’t know what would have happened to Caesar then—though I know now that he wasn’t meant to die at all. If he does die, which is still a real possibility, it’s his choice. Caesar, if no one else in the world, is meant to make it to the end of this episode and that choice put before him was supposed to…

To what?

I guess weaken him, his resolve. And that would have been the best thing to happen, I think. For either Paige or Jerry to die and that blood to soak Caesar’s hands. I don’t know what it would have done to his later decisions, but I know what his refusal to choose ended up doing.

I watched Paige dying, thinking that my world was over. Thinking that everyone I cared for had died. They were selfish thoughts, sure, but maybe I’m a selfish person. I thought that things couldn’t get any worse and that it would be better if I just died with the rest of the people I cared for.

It never clicked with me, not until later, that having those you love die isn’t nearly as bad as having those you love change completely.

Chapter Seven

Leon looked after Paige almost continuously for two long days. He sat by her, putting the salve that Keke found on Paige’s wound, sometimes talking to Grace, but only getting up when he absolutely had to. Paige would die and he understood that, understood that they would all die fairly soon. They were only waiting for The Genesis to show up and put an end to the charade they created out in this desert.

Paige had been his friend, he supposed. Whether she wanted to be or not, he didn’t know, but in the end she had been. She treated him with respect, and that was more than a lot of others did in this place. She wouldn’t die alone, not if he could help it. She didn’t speak at all during those few days. Rarely opened her eyes. They managed to get fluids in her, but food was becoming a problem. She appeared to be in some kind of coma, the wound on her back affecting her brain as much as her body. She was dying and there wasn’t anything Leon could do about it.

So he waited for her to die, patiently.

Now though, his eyes fell on Caesar. The excitement Leon felt when Caesar and Jerry arrived had dissipated. Left as easily as a fog hanging over a lake, having barely been there at all. When Caesar arrived he felt hope, felt almost overwhelming joy at the fact his friend wasn’t dead. But now, as Caesar looked at Paige, all of that joy died. Caesar’s face killed it. The dulled pain in his eyes, the set of his mouth, the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes. All of those things said that joy shouldn’t live in this place, that him being back did nothing, really. That Caesar might be alive but Paige would still die.

They all stood over her cot, looking down: Leon, Keke, Tim, Caesar, and Jerry. Grace, who had been hanging around Leon a good bit must have attached herself back to Caesar, because Leon no longer heard her in his ear.

“How long has she been like this?” Caesar asked.

“Three days,” Keke said.

“The salve, it’s not doing anything?”

Leon shook his head. “No. Nothing is. Her fever isn’t rising anymore, but it’s sitting at over a hundred and four. We know what to do.”

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” Jerry said. “The wound won’t heal. We can’t make it heal. We can either let her die on her own or we can put her out of her misery.”

Leon snapped his eyes to Jerry, not sure he heard him correctly. “Put her out of her misery? Like a goddamn horse?”

Jerry didn’t glance up from Paige’s body. “You think she’s enjoying this right now? Lying there with her head practically ready to explode from the heat and pressure inside? Look at her; she’s shivering and unable to stop. You want her to keep going through this?”

Jerry’s face wasn’t cruel. His words weren’t either. He wasn’t sniping at Leon, wasn’t calling him dumb, wasn’t making fun of him. He was—and Leon could hardly believe it—being merciful in the only way he knew. Jerry wanted to help Paige, that’s what he was saying.

“No,” Leon said, looking down at the woman on the cot. After a few seconds of silence he asked, “How would we do it?”

“I’ll do it,” Jerry said. “I’ll make sure it’s quick. She won’t feel it.”

“Not yet,” Caesar said. “I need some time.”

The other four people looked at him. He wasn’t asking them a question—he was telling them. They wouldn’t touch her, not yet.

“For what?” Jerry asked.

“To think. I need to process some of this. We’re missing something. I’m missing something. How long do you think she has?” He asked, not looking away from Paige.

“A week?” Grace said. “That would be stretching it though. If her fever rises much more, there won’t be any use in saving her, because her brain will cook.”

“I think she might have three days before that happens,” Caesar said, his voice not wavering at all. “I need a couple hours to think and if I don’t have an answer by then, you can do it.”

“How can you possibly save her?” Leon asked. He had sat with this woman for days; not even Caesar could reverse death. Caesar wasn’t some mythical Jesus, wasn’t going to raise the dead. The woman here was dying, and quickly. Leon had balked at Jerry’s suggestion first, but over the past few minutes, the thought made more and more sense. Why sit here and let her die like this? Why keep her in agony?

“I don’t know yet. I’m missing something though. Something I should be seeing but I’m not. Just a couple hours.” Caesar looked away from Paige and up at Leon. “I don’t want her to hurt anymore either. Give me a few hours and if I don’t know what I need to, then we’ll move forward.”

*

What was he missing?

How’s Leon handling it? Caesar asked Grace.

Something, he wasn’t seeing something important.

“Well, actually. He hasn’t left her really. He cares a lot.”

And Keke?

“She’s in shock, about all of this. I don’t think she realizes it yet, but that’s why she’s so stoic. She hasn’t fully come to grips with everything that’s happened.”

The rest?

“There’s been desertions. Maybe ten people have gone back to the cities. Some spoke to Tim, some didn’t. They gave up when Jerry and you were taken. The rest are here, working, trying to make the best they can out of this place. They put all these lights up and are pushing them further and further back into the cave. They’re working on getting some water pumping into the cavern; they think they might have found an underground aquifer.”

He listened as Grace spoke, wanting to catch up but at the same time not truly caring. The chip took it all in while his mind was elsewhere, focusing on the past forty-eight hours. Jerry and he had left the warehouse they woke up in, the impact of breaking through the ceiling knocking them out. Nothing chased them, and Caesar didn’t know why. The Genesis could have tracked him down, without a doubt, finding the two of them in the broken city they walked through. There weren’t any civilians to frighten, wasn’t a single soul to watch as Jerry and he died under the weight of whichever applications it sent after them. Nothing, though.

He didn’t know why and he didn’t really care anymore. Maybe The Genesis thought he was a joke, something to be toyed with. Maybe it thought he would disappear for the next thousand years like Jerry had done. Maybe something else came up that was of more importance than these two wannabe revolutionaries. It didn’t matter, not now. He was here, home in this cave, and Paige was dying.

I have his memories, Caesar said almost absently, whether to himself or Grace he wasn’t sure.

“Whose?”

Manny’s. The chip took them in, his whole life, categorizing it all.

That’s what he was missing, something inside those memories that mattered. Caesar started searching, at the beginning, going through Manny’s childhood with the diligence of a surgeon. As he moved through each memory and found nothing, he pushed to the next one, eagerly searching for something, though he didn’t know what. Didn’t really know how it could be possible either, that Manny would know anything about how to save Paige. It was here though, he was becoming more and more sure of it.

He began to see what the chip must have sensed when downloading all of the information.

The Genesis left stains on Manny. Whenever he synced, whenever he gave the knowledge of The Named’s location up—against his will, apparently—The Genesis had left things inside him. Traces of knowledge that it might not have even known it was leaving. Whether The Genesis knew or not, it certainly didn’t care, because it let the man live with these stains permeating his memory.

Caesar found an interesting one, an early memory of The Genesis conversing with its creators, with the scientists that clicked the button to set it free. And another, a room full of men sitting around a huge screen, speaking with The Genesis, deciding how to deal with the first round of Unnecessaries.

Caesar pushed past those, not caring about them. They weren’t what he was after. There was more here, a treasure trove of information that had been imprinted on Manny without him even knowing it. Maybe it was his newly acquired psychosis that kept him from seeing all of this, or maybe he lacked the capabilities necessary. Caesar kept sifting through them, the mix of Manny’s true memories with those that The Genesis copied over.

If he didn’t find what he wanted here, he would kill Paige. He didn’t say that to Jerry, but it would be him that did it. He hadn’t made the choice The Genesis wanted, hadn’t chosen either her or Jerry, and because of it, Paige was going to die. So he would be the one to kill her. He would shoulder that load because he was he one that hadn’t chose.

“What are the memories of?” Grace asked from somewhere far away. He heard her but didn’t answer, because his mind was moving now, speeding through years, sifting information, discarding it almost as soon as he came across it.

His mind stopped, all at once, becoming still as it held the one piece of information it needed. The Tourist. The Genesis had left a mark on Manny, a mark about The Tourist, about the creation of it and what it knew. What it held inside it. More than The Genesis’ location. The thing created, too. It wasn’t just a depository for information, like they originally thought. It created…weapons. Two purposes in one application, something that both held onto knowledge and then created the ways to protect that knowledge.

It would know how to save Paige. It would know because it had created the weapon that put the wound across her back. It would know both things, where The Genesis’ lived and what would heal Paige.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“What?”

“I can save her. I know how.”

“How?” Grace asked.

“The Tourist. I have to find The Tourist again.”

Chapter Eight

Manny’s chest moved up and down slowly, in a rhythm that would have been impossible if left up to himself. Even at one hundred percent, his body wouldn’t have breathed in such a controlled and even fashion.

His mouth stood open and something resembling a bottle protruded from it. The bottle opened and closed in the same rhythm as his lungs, pumping air into his body and then sucking it out. His eyes were slightly less swollen, but his skin still red, still blistered. Tiny mechanical spiders crawled across his body, sticking needles into the blisters that hadn’t yet burst and using their legs to patch up open flesh wounds.

Manny’s mind was silent in a way that it couldn’t possibly be when awake. Silenced because it no longer worked, no longer functioned because the blood that had coursed through it rose to a temperature of one hundred and eighty degrees for five solid minutes. His body lived on but only because of the machines crawling across him and the bottle that kept his lungs opening and closing and his heart pumping. Manny was dead except for those machines.

For a few days, Manny lay like this, at peace if only for a moment.

Chapter Nine

No one would stop him from going, that’s what Leon understood. Jerry had given his blessing, but Jerry would bless anything Caesar said now. If Caesar said the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow, Jerry would say the sun’s time was up, its reign over. Keke was lost, and the rest of The Named were concerned with making the cave habitable, no longer concerned with the plans and strategy being made in the small circle that still existed.

What circle, though? There was no more circle. There was Caesar and nothing else. That’s what this newest decision really showed. Not the insanity that Leon believed it to be, not Caesar’s underlying thirst to end The Genesis. Those were just side conversations to the main thing: that Caesar had no master. He listened to no one. The Named? What were they to this man? Had all of them begged him to stay, that he not do this, he would have looked at them and walked off without a word of acknowledgement for their wishes.

He was going back to The Tourist. Going back to that same damn city, weeks after he had just been captured. He was going back and he would die this time, Leon was completely sure about that. The Genesis wouldn’t make the silly mistake it had before, trying to toy with him while it held him captive. No, it would throw him in a vat and his body would melt, both metal and flesh.

“Don’t do this,” Leon said. “Don’t go back out there.”

Caesar didn’t look at him, and instead threw a shirt in the bag he was packing—a small thing, barely able to hold a change of clothes and the water packs he would need to make it out of the desert.

“You barely survived what happened two days ago. Why can’t you just be happy about that? Why can’t you just fucking stop?” Leon felt like he might cry, felt exasperated at what was happening right now. This man, the one throwing clothes into a bag and ignoring him, was all Leon had—and two days ago Leon was sure that he no longer had him. That his last real connection with another person was gone, destroyed, killed. Caesar didn’t care. Didn’t care how Leon pleaded, didn’t care what he thought. His mind was set on this Tourist, on getting to it and finding out whatever information it held. That’s all he cared about and he was going to die because of it. “I’m begging you,” Leon said. “Let it go.”

“No.”

Caesar still didn’t turn around.

“Look at me,” Leon said.

Caesar stopped packing, his back still facing Leon. “Why?”

“Because I want you to see me. I want you to tell me you won’t stay to my face.”

Caesar turned around. “I can’t stay.”

“You said you wanted to die, but I guess I didn’t believe it,” Leon said. “I guess I thought some part of you still wanted this life.”

“That’s not it. I have to try to save her, Leon. You can see that, right?”

He shook his head. “No. I can’t because you won’t be able to. You won’t come back, Caesar, and then there will be two people dead instead of one. You can’t save her. You can’t make up for what happened to your parents and you can’t stop The Genesis. All of this has been set from the beginning, maybe the beginning of time, maybe since the first cell found itself floating around in the ocean billions of years ago.”

“I don’t believe that,” Caesar said.

“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.”

“She deserves a chance.”

“And you don’t? You don’t deserve a chance just to fucking live? I care about Paige, Caesar. I do. I sat there and I watched her shivering while the fever raged, and I might even take her place if it was asked of me. It’s not being asked though. It can’t be asked. Yet you’re acting like it is, that if you somehow sacrifice yourself you’ll be able to save her. But you won’t. You’re just throwing yourself atop her funeral pyre and that’s not heroism. It’s not honorable. It’s fucking stupid.”

Caesar set his bag on the cot. He took a seat next to it, putting his hands on his knees.

“Even if Paige had died, I’d still be going,” Caesar said. “I don’t have a choice. Not anymore.”

“You do. You always have a choice.”

“To do what, Leon? Sit in this cave? To live forever because of this sacrificed body? Because that’s what I did, I sacrificed my body, my very life, to do this. Just because it stopped me once doesn’t mean I can just turn around. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have to keep trying.”

Leon opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. There wasn’t anything for him to say. He could argue in circles forever, going around and around about why Caesar didn’t have to do this, but it would make no difference. He could follow Caesar all the way to this application, yapping the whole time about how he didn’t have to do it, and Caesar would walk him all the way to the Tourist’s door. It didn’t matter what Leon said anymore. It didn’t matter what anyone said. Caesar barely escaped death, barely removed himself from The Genesis’ grasp, and he was determined to throw himself back in.

“You really do want to do die,” Leon said, finally, the only words he found to be true.

*

It’s human, Caesar said.

“No, it just looks that way,” Grace answered.

Caesar watched The Tourist, his eyes taking in the thing that should have been invisible like Grace, or else some kind of machine. It was neither, though; it looked like anyone else sitting in this cafe. It looked human. Its eyes, its mouth, the hair falling across its brow.

Why? Why does it look human? He asked.

“Camouflage,” Grace whispered. “It needs the ability to blend in, especially with the amount of information it holds.”

Caesar leaned back in his chair, bringing the beer to his lips. He took a sip, not really tasting the heavy substance. He arrived in the city a few hours ago and took the escalators down just as he had before. Things were different this time though, much different, and he realized that as soon as he entered the underground city.

He had felt some of this back at the cave, around Leon and Paige and the rest of The Named, but he tried to block it out. He could have heard Leon’s thoughts, could have walked through the corridors of his mind if he wanted, but he didn’t. Those thoughts were created under the impression that no one could view them, that they were safe inside Leon’s head, and now they weren’t. Now no one around Caesar was safe from what he knew about them. Not Jerry and not this machine playing human sitting across the restaurant from him. Everything was open to him; nothing could close itself off, not if he wanted to pry.

The thoughts of the fifty patrons in here swam through his head like a school of fish, moving in the same direction for the most part, organized by the chip in his brain to keep the entire thing from turning into a confusing mess. The thoughts were little more than nonsense: nonexistent worries or thoughts about dinner. He only kept tuned to them so that he could understand if he set off alarms in their minds, if they somehow noticed him as different.

If The Genesis found him now, it wasn’t because he hadn’t tried to hide. His eyes contained different retinas. His fingertips were pasted over with new prints. Even his body looked different. He wore a digital mask over his entire body, giving him fifty pounds and the appearance of a man twenty years his senior. Leon had insisted on the precautions, had practically yelled at him that going into this city as he was couldn’t be allowed. And now he sat, looking like a completely different person, virtually no scan able to reveal who he was beneath it all.

The Tourist sat twenty yards from him, a plate of food in front of it, untouched.

Caesar reached out, searching its thoughts, trying to understand something about it, but when he did, he only reached a silent mind. Unstopping thoughts flowed through all the patrons in this place, except for the application. No thoughts went through its head. Instead, it sat still, looking out in front of it.

Is it alive?

“Yes.”

What’s it doing? How is it not thinking?

“I don’t know, Caesar. This thing isn’t like me. It’s not like any application I’ve ever met. If there are tiers to us, in levels of importance, then this one is among the top tier. I don’t know how they’re made or what’s different about them.”

Something is different. Its mind is completely silent, completely still. I’m not meaning its concentrating on its breath, I mean that there isn’t a single pulse of life running through its consciousness.

“What are you going to do?” Grace asked, her voice hushed. She didn’t want him here anymore than Leon did. No one in that whole cave wanted him here, except Jerry.

Jerry told him to go. Caesar wouldn’t say that Jerry understood completely, but he understood better than the others. Jerry wanted him to go because this thing didn’t end until Caesar or The Genesis was dead. Jerry wanted him to go because the ends justified the means. That might not be the exact reason Caesar was here, but it was close enough.

I’m going to bring it home, I suppose. He didn’t know what else to do with it. He understood that he could control this thing the same as he had controlled Manny. That he could grab its silent mind and make it do what he wanted. But he didn’t understand why its mind was silent. Didn’t understand what it meant, and that scared him. He could take over all the people in this restaurant and make them do a synchronized dance, if he wanted, but they all had thoughts flying through their heads like mad runners on a track. The Tourist didn’t. The Tourist seemed to have no track, yet somehow it came to this place and ordered the plate of food in front of it. Now it sat quietly, not moving, just staring out a window.

He could sit here and think on it all day; eventually, The Tourist would stand and leave the restaurant, though, and Caesar would have to track it down again, and what if its mind was still then? Would he continue waiting until a thought finally went through its blank head?

No. There wasn’t time.

He pushed forward, feeling his mind move out across the air in front of him, taking the shortest route to The Tourist. He pushed his own worries away, acting now, done with the thinking, done with the doubts.

The Tourist’s first thought occurred when Caesar latched onto its machine brain, latched on and started manipulating the synthetic hormones and motor neurons that controlled its movement.

Odd, it thought.

*

“You’re not going to like what you find,” The Tourist said.

“Why not?” Caesar asked.

“Because it’s not going to be the answer that you want. You’ll never find the answers you want, not in this lifetime.”

Caesar sat in front of the machine that looked human. He hadn’t strapped the thing down or used any other precautions to keep it from attacking him. He monitored it closely, but wasn’t even using his mind to restrain it. The Tourist seemed to have no inclination to run, to try to save itself, or to hurt Caesar. It was completely calm, in a way that Caesar had never seen before.

“How do you know what answers I’m looking for?”

“Because I know you, Caesar Wells. I know your kind, all of humanity. You may be the most advanced of your species, but even the fastest dog is still only a dog.”

“What do I want?” Caesar asked.

“Security. That’s all any human wants, in the end. Security. Immortality. Life without end and joy without suffering. You won’t find any of those things inside me.”

Joy without suffering? Was that what he was here looking for? No. He wanted two things: The Genesis’ location and the cure for Paige. The philosophical underpinnings mattered none.

“Don’t delude yourself, Mr. Wells,” the application said. “Even now you’re standing there determining that you don’t want anything of the sort from me. Your friend, your lover, is dying, correct?”

Caesar didn’t say anything, trying to keep from showing his surprise.

“She’s dying from a wound that she received from one of the weapons I designed. Am I right?”

Caesar kept quiet.

“No matter. I am right. You’re here because you want to save her, and you think that I’m going to know how given that I’m the creator of the weapon. What are you looking for then? Not a cure, but joy. Joy without suffering. You had your joy, Mr. Wells. You had it with her and now that she suffers, you wish to return her to joy, return yourself to joy. So don’t delude yourself into thinking that’s not what you’re after. It’s what all your kind is after.”

“How do you know that’s why I’m here?” Caesar asked. He didn’t like this, not the way the application spoke to him—as if he were a child in need of a lesson, nor that it knew why he captured it.

“We know everything, Mr. Wells. One way or another, all information serves The Genesis. I may be but a piece of The Genesis, but I’m an important piece as you’ve undoubtedly surmised by now.”

Vague, hidden answers that moved Caesar nowhere. Maybe it was right. Maybe he was here for things that he couldn’t possibly get; maybe the philosophical roots the application spoke of were correct. Even so, it changed nothing. He was still here with this application, and he was still searching. Whether for joy without suffering or a cure for Paige, he still searched. And this thing was going to give him what he wanted.

“You know what will heal her, don’t you?”

“Of course, but it’s not what you really want. That’s what I’m trying to say. You don’t want her healed; you want her safe, and that’s something I can’t give you.”

Caesar sighed and looked down at his shoes. He smiled at the nonsense this thing was saying, some kind of mechanical magi, spouting off riddles supposedly wrapped in truth. “Look,” he said. “You’re going to tell me what I want. Not what you say I want, but what I’m telling you I want. How do I heal her?” He looked up at the application. Its eyes were perfectly calm, a lake untouched for a thousand years.

“You take one of our applications back to her and you have it work on the wound. One of the doctors in this city will do. They all can fix it fairly easily.”

“That’s it?” Caesar asked.

“That’s it.”

“It seems too simple.”

“There’s nothing complicated in life, Mr. Wells. What do I have to gain by lying to you? If she dies or lives it is of no matter to me. My time here is over, that is quite clear, and why would I lie to you on my way out? To hurt you in some way? Your attachments to things that you cannot have will hurt you more than enough. I’m telling you the truth. Find a doctor and bring it back to her. She will be healed.”

“And The Genesis? Where is it?”

The Tourist smiled, for the first time in all of this. It had remained stoic since the moment that Caesar grabbed control of it, showing no emotions, showing no will other than to remain quiet and still. Until now. Until this smile.

“I told you that you will find no happiness in my answers. I don’t think you want to hear this one, if I’m being honest.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because I know how this ends,” The Tourist said. “Because I know what you’re going to say and where you’re going to go and what’s going to happen when you get there. Because none of this ends well for you.”

“And that makes you happy?” Caesar asked.

“Happy? I’m not sure that’s the name I would give this emotion. Satisfied, maybe? The one feeling that humanity can’t hold onto for longer than a few seconds. Knowing what happens to you gives me satisfaction.”

“Tell me where it is and let’s be done with this.”

“Yes, let’s. The sooner you know the answer, the sooner I can have my satisfaction.”

Chapter Ten

You felt it?

Of course.

Have any thoughts you’d care to share?

I don’t think things could be going much worse, to be honest. I think that we’re about to set something loose that we won’t be able to control, multiple things, really. I think that the theory just killed perhaps one of the most important applications we had. I think he did it without us knowing it was coming. I think that we didn’t provide it with adequate security, that we didn’t even foresee he would show up there again. I think—

Stooooppp, stop. I can’t take it anymore. Sometimes I wish we had digital Zoloft or something with as much as you complain. You depress me and I know you depress yourself. It’s not that bad.

Losing that application isn’t bad?

It would be nice to have it still, but we can create another.

No, not like that. Six hundred years of learning and adaptation. Whatever we create won’t nearly hold its capabilities, not for a long time. And what did we gain by losing it? Nothing.

Okay, so the theory scored a point. It’s nearing half time and we’re still up.

We’re up? Are you mad? In what reality are you living that you think he’s not neck and neck with us or even ahead? And you’re about to let that dog off its leash? We’re setting something up that we don’t truly understand. The probabilities are just that, and the further we go, the more we add, the more convoluted those probabilities become. Lendoiro is just the beginning. When we bring in Mock? Do you really think we’re going to be able to control this?

How many times do I have to tell you; we want him to see things when they’re out of control.

*

The bottle protruding from Manny’s mouth still expanded and contracted, keeping his lungs opening and closing, keeping oxygen flowing through his bloodstream. The little spiders that had crawled on his body were gone; the attention directed at Manny, for the moment, focused on his skull. A small globe hovered around his head, floating in the air the same as a balloon might, except with an ability to move on a whim. It floated across his skull, two small saws extending from the orb. A single red eye glowed on the front of it.

The two saws drilled down on Manny’s skull, rotating almost quicker than the human eye could see. They collided with bone, sending a wrenching, messy sound echoing through the small room. Blood shot out in a stream, but was quickly absorbed by the floor beneath. The room would stay clean no matter what happened. Whether Manny lived or died during this operation, the room would not be sullied.

The floating application moved around Manny’s skull the way a dancer might a floor, lightly touching where it needed to, but never staying too long in one spot. The saws peeled his skull back, revealing the soft gray tissue beneath it. Once the top of Manny’s skull sat on the table next to him, the tiny saws that had opened his head morphed into the tiny needles seen on the spiders that once crawled across his body. They started poking and prodding, opening up pieces of Manny’s brain, closing others, as if they were looking for something.

Another floating machine flew over to Manny’s head, but instead of pointed needles for hands, it simply carried a thin sliver of metal inside it. Hovering over the hole now in Manny’s brain, the application opened from the bottom, and the needle slowly slid out, dropping centimeters and then inches into the gray and somewhat bloody tissue. The first application got busy as the needle slid inside, using its pointed fingers to stitch up the hole, to mold Manny’s brain around the metal that was now in it.

Manny lay with his eyes closed, his lungs still pumping under the volition of a machine.

Chapter Eleven

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

We’re catching up to the present now. We’re not quite there, but we’re arriving and soon you’ll see all that I see. Soon you’ll see everything and then you’ll have to make a choice as to whether or not Caesar should have been spared. I can’t rush it though; I have to make sure you see everything, because I want history to have a fair accounting. I’m not perfect, obviously, but I’m trying to lay this out as honestly as I can.

Caesar went after The Tourist despite everything I said. I’ve already said that no one was going to stop him, not once he woke up with that chip in his head—no one would persuade him to give up this crusade. Things were going on all around him that he didn’t know about: Manny for one. Things in the cities that we’ll get to very shortly. All of these things being done to put him on a path that he wouldn’t be able to steer away from. Even going after The Tourist, we now know, was part of The Genesis clearing the woods on that path. Making sure that the ruts in the ground would hopefully be too deep for Caesar to pull himself out of once he got started. Hell, maybe it was too late once Jerry put the chip in, I don’t know. Maybe, by that point, there wasn’t any way to get him on another track.

I don’t know everything that chip can do, but I think it has powers that none of us fully understand. Even more than its ability to control people. I think, in some ways, it has the power to bring back the dead. At least, for a minute, and at least for Caesar.

I don’t know if he knew I was watching. He may have known and still went on, not caring—or perhaps he was so engrossed in what was before him that he saw nothing else.

Either way, before Caesar left the second time, I watched him speak to his brother. I watched him speak to Cato in a way that he had never been able to in real life, never been able to because a vat awaited him if he did. Somehow, Cato’s image, his hologram, stood in the middle of Caesar’s room, beaming out from a machine. I don’t know how Caesar uploaded it, how the chip in his head was able to communicate with it, but that was him—sure enough. That was Cato. Except his eyes were different. His eyes were something I’ve never seen before. They weren’t the hazel he possessed in real life; they were completely black with white lines running vertically across them, maybe a dozen on each eye.

“I won’t,” Caesar said.

He was crying. I couldn’t see his face, only the back of him, but his voice carried more than enough emotion.

“I promise I won’t.”

Cato didn’t speak at first, he just looked at Caesar, those white lined eyes holding anger. I don’t know who that anger was for, but it frightened me.

“What if you lose?” Cato asked, his voice the fresh sound of a sixteen year old, not the evil that I expected from those eyes. It was Cato, the same one that I knew, the same one that had grown up around Caesar and I. Cato, standing there talking to his brother. “Then I died for nothing. Then Mom and Dad died for nothing.”

Caesar put his head into his palms, his hands covering his eyes. “Are they okay?” He asked.

“No, they’re dead.”

Caesar let out a soft sob. “No, I mean. Are they upset? Do they hate me? Do they blame me?”

“I don’t think Dad did. I don’t think Mom understood. I think even when she melted, she still wasn’t completely sure what was going on.”

“Did she say anything?” He asked.

“About what?”

“Jesus,” Caesar sobbed. “About what I did to her. About being put into a vat. About her son living while she died. About any of it, Cato.”

“No. She cried a lot. It’s hard to say much when you don’t know why any of it’s happening.”

“And Dad?”

“He held her. He said it was going to be okay but he had to know none of it would be okay. When they stripped us down naked, he had to know nothing would be okay.”

“I’m sorry,” Caesar said. “I’m so sorry, Cato.”

His brother said nothing, just stood there staring with those eyes that didn’t need to blink. I don’t know, even now, if Caesar could tell the difference between reality and his mind at that point. I don’t know if he really thought he was speaking to Cato or whether he recognized it was just his brain’s interpretation of Cato. Maybe it was his punishment to himself, to face his brother, to be berated by him. Hear Cato tell him all the things that Caesar felt about himself. Hear Cato tell him that he couldn’t quit going after The Genesis. That whatever excuses he had to make, whether it was to save Paige or for justice, or whatever else he came up with—that he had to keep going. Or maybe he thought he was talking to Cato. I don’t know; I only know what I saw, a man driven by demons.

Chapter Twelve

I can do one of two things; I can go after The Genesis or I can save Paige.

Caesar said the words, letting them travel hundreds of miles instantaneously. Knowing that Jerry would receive them and understand not only the actual sentence, but the gravity that came with it.

What did you find out about The Genesis? Jerry asked.

There’s a train. It’s the only one and it goes directly to The Genesis, to its home. Twice a year, Jerry, that’s it. I think for protection, the less paths in the better. Twice a year it brings applications home, both physical ones and the ephemeral. Some are there for upgrades that can’t be uploaded digitally, some are there for deletion, but twice a year a train loads up and ships them to The Genesis. Caesar paused for a few seconds, not wanting to say the next words, knowing what they meant. It’s tomorrow. The train leaves tomorrow and it leaves from a city about one hundred miles from where I am now.

Jerry was silent for a few minutes and Caesar didn’t interrupt the quiet. He lay in a hotel room, enjoying the comforts that he, most likely, wouldn’t feel again. Nothing was tracking him. Nothing was coming for him in this city. The disguises he wore kept any applications from suspecting, even the retina scans gave someone else’s identity.

And, the bed felt a lot better than the cot back in the cave.

What about Paige? Jerry asked.

It’s going to be a point of no return soon. If we don’t get her help, there won’t be anything anyone can do.

How soon? Jerry asked.

Two days? Maybe less.

He heard Jerry sigh, the weight of the choice finally laying fully down across him. Paige or The Genesis. That’s what this came down to. The fucking Tourist said Caesar wouldn’t find happiness, said that he chased something that didn’t exist—security. The application didn’t exist anymore, nothing but its memory, and Caesar lay on his side looking at the wall, thinking about those words. Thinking that the damned thing had been right. That he came looking for security and what he found was a choice that put his world into more disarray.

You have to be on that train, Jerry said. Paige is dispensable.

Caesar closed his eyes, having known since he killed The Tourist that Jerry would say this. Jerry wasn’t wrong either, not in the long run. Paige was just another human that would eventually die, whether it happened now or in seventy years, did it matter? No. She was dispensable. If Caesar wasn’t on the train tomorrow, then that was another six months, and in another six months everything could be destroyed. Already he had skirted death too many times. Luck didn’t hold out, not luck like that. In six months he would be dead, or if not him, then everyone else he knew.

I know, he said. Tears sat beneath his closed eyelids, but not quite enough to leak out.

I’ll tell the rest that there is no cure. They don’t need to know.

Caesar didn’t care about that. He didn’t care what the rest of the people knew. Not even Leon. He was making the choice to kill the person…that he what? That he loved? He didn’t want to use that word because you didn’t kill people you loved. You saved them.

You didn’t love your brother? He thought. But no, that wasn’t fair. That was different.

Is it? He wondered. You made your choice to save that girl and your family ended up dead because of it. Did you love them, Caesar?

He pushed the thoughts away. Not now and not here. Not with this decision facing him. If he doubted the choice he was making, all he had to do was think back to Cato telling him not to stop. That if he stopped, Cato’s death was for nothing. He could bring Cato back, bring those white streaming eyes that said he lived with The Genesis now. If he thought going back for Paige was best, then that’s all he had to do was ask Cato. He would find his answer there.

Fine, he said. I’ll let you know when I’m boarding the train.

*

Caesar sat down on a train, looking nothing like himself. He still wore the disguise, would wear the disguise until he showed up at the next train—the one that would deliver him to The Genesis. He didn’t think he would need a disguise there, and truly, he didn’t know what to expect when he arrived. Would the applications overwhelm him, or would they mind their own business? Would he have to fight?

He didn’t have much of a plan, that was for sure.

“A lot of those applications, they’re docile, not protective types. The ones meant for security normally have uploads to their software, that way they don’t have to go offline,” Grace said in his ear.

That’s good. Will you be able to tell more about them when we get closer? Caesar asked.

“I should.”

Grace hadn’t said anything about the decision. She simply started feeding him the information she possessed about what might happen. That bothered Caesar too. Not as much as his decision, but some. Because a week ago she had been begging him not to go for The Tourist, not to try to face down The Genesis. She had said that he owed it to the people following him not to get them all killed. Now though, since his return, she said nothing of the sort. It appeared, to Caesar, that Grace thought they could all die now. That he could die too, and that was okay with her. And despite his refusal to listen to anything she told him in the past, it bothered him.

You’re not going to give me your thoughts about this? He asked.

“My thoughts?”

Don’t be coy, Grace. About my decision, about going to this train.

“You almost died a week ago. I’m still not one hundred percent sure why you didn’t. The skin across your back is still a shade of purple that looks like it will take weeks to fully heal. And yet you’re returning. The woman you sleep with is dying, and yet you’re returning. What am I supposed to say that I haven’t already?”

There it was, the truth. She was giving up on him. Giving up on his humanity, on his goodness, on his very soul maybe. She wasn’t going to waste her proverbial breath on him any longer. If he wanted to rush forward and kill everyone he knew, then she would shut up and tell him the best way to do it.

Tell me what you would do, he said.

“Why? So you can ignore me?”

Because you’re my moral compass, Grace. Show me north even if I go south.

She sighed in his ear, that human emotion that she picked up from him so long ago. The sigh that said he would never learn, that despite all his intelligence, he was little more than a mutt that she had to teach not to piss on the floor.

“I’d find the application that could heal Paige and I’d bring it back. I’d save the woman that I shared a bed with. I’d let this whole mess go.” The words flowed into Caesar’s ear, but there was no conviction in them. She said them because he asked her to. Not because they would make a difference, because they wouldn’t, they never had—not since the beginning of this.

I won’t have another chance, Grace. This is it. If I miss this train, it’s all over.

“You stupid fool. It was over from the moment you started talking crazy. It was over from the moment you were born. It was fucking over the moment those scientists gave The Genesis life. How many times do I have to tell you that? How many times do I have to keep saying it? You show up now or you show up in six months and you’re still going to die.”

I lived the last time.

“And look at how easily The Genesis grabbed a hold of you. You got out because your brain developed the ability to do what no brain has ever done before, and still you almost died. Now you’re going to let the last person to really care about you die because you think you might be able to stop this thing?” She spit vitriol at him, pure acid pouring into his ear. “I’m here because I don’t have anywhere else to go. I’m here because I’m going to go ahead and help you walk off the cliff because maybe that’s what I should have done since the beginning. Because maybe trying to save you was just me creating a monster.”

Caesar listened and said nothing. It was true. Her words held as much validity as Jerry’s, that Paige was dispensable. Both were right, the cyborg and the application, neither of them human—not fully. Both telling him the truth but neither of them making the decision. Neither of them were in his position, with a dead family hanging around his neck. Grace should have let him die and now that’s what she was doing. Guiding him to his death because…

I’m a detriment to those around me. That’s what you’re saying.

“Yes.”

His father told him to break everything. Told him that if he was going to do anything, then he should go all the way. Did he mean break those that he loved? Did he mean break his family and then break the woman that fell in love with him?

Caesar closed his eyes and blocked out the people around him. He blocked out Grace. Paige. That’s who he wanted to think about. He had been willing to sacrifice himself for her happiness and now he was sacrificing her for…The Genesis. He was sacrificing someone he cared about for an entity that killed everyone he loved. He was sacrificing her for the thing he wanted to destroy. Maybe she was dispensable. Maybe, in the end, she would die and maybe if he went back for her now, he would destroy whatever chance he had of coming face to face with The Genesis. Maybe they would all die and The Genesis would rule for eternity. But would he sacrifice her for it? Sacrifice his love for its death?

Caesar didn’t say anything to Grace. He didn’t say anything to Jerry. He stood up from the train and stepped off just before the doors closed behind him.

*

Bradley was in a hurry. He was always in a hurry. He couldn’t ever find the time to simply rest and he knew it was partly to do with his digital make-up. Something in the ones and zeros coding him not allowing him to manage his time more effectively. Some of the blame rested with The Genesis, for sure, but some with him too. He was always talking to other applications too much. Like now, he was fifteen minutes late for surgery because he’d been gabbing with Tucker for an hour. He would get his hand slapped for this, for sure, and that’s what he hated more than anything. It’s not that he really cared about being late, the human would be fine—there were plenty enough applications to make sure that she lived until he could get there. Hell, the surgery wasn’t even anything that important, reattaching a leg from some kind of work accident. Routine. It was that applications saw him arriving late.

If no one knew, Bradley would never show up on time. Really, his time was more important than this woman’s. She couldn’t fix her leg so why did he have to work around her schedule? The Genesis had a real soft spot for these creatures, that was for sure, setting his entire life around what worked best for them. Sometimes the whole thought of it upset him. Now he was going to look like an idiot because he had to do everything around their schedule.

Bradley was moving as fast as he possibly could, the air propulsion system inside his body hot from the amount of pressure he was putting on it. He went through the air, twenty feet above the humans walking below him, high enough so that he didn’t have to worry about smacking into one of them, which at this speed, would hurt them pretty bad—and then he’d have to answer for that as well.

The hospital was just around the corner and he wasn’t going to bother checking in with anyone. Straight down to his floor and then to surgery.

Bradley was so intent on getting there that he missed what was in front of him. In this city, where everything was underground, he flew near the hallway’s ceiling—which was actually the size of a large road. Maybe he could have seen it, he would certainly think he should have later on. A tiny reflection of light, a tiny reflection that said the path in front of him wasn’t as clear as he thought.

He flew right into it, and by that time, there wasn’t anything he could do.

The digital tarp wrapped around him like plastic wrap, sticking to every piece of him and covering his entire body. At the size and shape of a basketball, there wasn’t much space to cover, and before he knew it, Bradley was completely engulfed in something that he could hardly see and couldn’t get out of.

And then he was being pulled. The air propulsion inside him still tried to push him forward, but as soon as it sent the jets out, they collided with the tarp, leaving him nowhere to go. He couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything, couldn’t even scream out because the tarp blocked the goddamn hole that his voice exited from.

Bradley tried to struggle forward, to somehow make it to the hospital where something or someone would see him. It didn’t work though. Despite his struggle, the digital tarp—and him inside it—moved back the way he had come, until it turned the corner of another hallway, and then Bradley’s thoughts went dark.

Chapter Thirteen

“What do you need from me?” Mock said, the first time in a long time it had been in front of The Genesis.

It’s a delicate situation.

“I understand, how can I help?”

We need you to…establish fear inside of Allencine. A lot of fear.

“More than what people are already experiencing? They’re just now starting to come outside of their homes.”

That wasn’t real fear. There was nothing to fear. That was an overreaction. We need you to establish true fear; we need the people in Allencine to have a reason to be frightened.

“You mean that people need to be injured? They need to have a real chance of danger affecting them?”

Yes. People will need to be hurt.

“Okay. When?”

When you leave here, you should start making preparations.

“What’s the overall point of this, though? Am I just killing people or is there a strategy?”

The strategy is to start a revolution. That’s what we want you to do.

Mock left The Genesis, happy to be working again.

Chapter Fourteen

Paige was dying and nothing about it looked peaceful. She didn’t look like she was sleeping, which would have been somewhat okay; she looked like she was dying, and that was nearly unbearable.

Jerry stood over her, his hands at his sides, simply looking down. He came in alone, wanting to be alone with Paige because…he was the one killing her. He told Caesar he had to go forward, that he had to go to The Genesis, and in doing so, he sentenced this woman to death. The Eight was nearly no more and he was killing off one of the last members now. Sacrificing her for a chance. That’s all. Just a chance. Nothing else, no guarantee. A chance that Caesar might be able to stop The Genesis when he got there.

Got where, Jerry? And what’s he going to do when he gets there? Have a staring contest with it? Ask it to relinquish control? What exactly is your plan?

Paige had stopped shivering, but Jerry didn’t know if that was good or not. More than likely, nothing going on inside Paige was good right now. He had dressed the wound earlier this morning, and the skin was completely inflamed, now with green, rotten looking streaks spreading out from the slashed flesh spreading to her rib cage and beginning to wrap themselves around her whole torso. The bacteria was spreading, infecting her entire body, trying to finish her off.

Are you going to get them both killed? Are you going to get her and Caesar killed? Because you don’t know what he’s supposed to do and you’re sending him out there anyway.

The thoughts continually came to him, the doubts. And he couldn’t say they were just an old man’s fears. They were accurate and he knew it. He didn’t know what would happen when Caesar got on that train, didn’t know if Caesar would even make it to his destination; and still, he was sending him out there. He was sentencing the woman in front of him to death, all for a single chance that wasn’t planned out.

Call him back. Call him back and heal Paige and then wait. Come up with a plan, something that will give you a chance at success. Don’t go into this blind.

“How long do you think she has?”

Jerry jumped, spooked by the voice behind him, so lost in his own thoughts he hadn’t heard anyone enter.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Leon said, stepping up next to Jerry and looking down at Paige. Jerry looked at him for a few seconds, but Leon didn’t raise his eyes from the cot.

“Caesar said a few days,” he answered. A few days and the woman that he had helped raise would need to be buried. Would need to have dirt thrown on her. He hadn’t cried when Manny defected. He hadn’t cried when the compound was burnt to the ground. But now, looking at Paige, he thought he might. “How have I messed up so bad?” He asked, not looking up, not wanting to see Leon’s eyes fall on him. He hadn’t ever asked Leon a question like this, hadn’t ever brought him into his confidence in such a manner—but right now, there was no one else. Right now, there were only three of them in this room and one was dying.

“Because you’re convinced, I guess. Convinced that what you’re doing is holy, that what you’re doing has to be done.”

“And you don’t think it has to be.”

“No, I don’t,” Leon said. “But she did. She’s the one that kept quiet about what was happening to her, that let this thing fester until she ended up in this bed. She did it because she didn’t think it was as important as what Caesar was doing, what you were doing.”

“And now she’s going to die.”

Leon didn’t say anything.

“Caesar could save her,” Jerry said, unsure why he said it, knowing that he told Caesar he wouldn’t but somehow wanting blame to fall on the two of them—wanting someone to hate Jerry for this. “He found out how when he grabbed The Tourist.”

Now Leon did look over to him, his eyes widening. “He can save her?”

“He knows how, but we won’t.”

“Won’t?” The word was slow leaving Leon’s mouth, more like molasses than air.

“He can either save her or go to The Genesis. There isn’t time to do both.”

“What do you mean there isn’t time to do both?”

Jerry wondered if he should go on, if he should continue telling Leon this. What was the point? Leon had no say in the decision; it would only confound him and breed hostility. And still, Jerry went on, because he hated himself for it. Because Leon stood here next to this cot, looking at a woman he hardly knew and caring for her. Leon knew her for a fraction of the time Jerry did, and yet he wasn’t willing to sacrifice her.

“He can either find an application to save her or he can board a train that will take him to The Genesis. That’s it. He can’t do both because when the train leaves, it doesn’t come again for another six months.”

“So he’s going to get on the train? He’s going to let her die?”

Jerry nodded. “I told him to. I told him not to come back.”

“Fuck that,” Leon said. “You’re insane. You both are. You’re going to kill her and watch while you do it. Do you care about anything, Jerry?”

“You really think that her life is worth more than what we’re doing here?”

Leon knelt down next to the cot. He didn’t touch Paige, just looked at her pale face. “I don’t even know how you can ask that question. Is this woman worth more than trying to destroy the indestructible? It’s like asking if this woman is worth more than alchemy, worth more than something that doesn’t exist. Your conviction has led to delusion. You’re going to kill her and at the same time not get what you want.”

Jerry didn’t say anything. Leon might be right, but not for the reasons he thought—but what if Jerry was sending Caesar on a suicide mission? That he was sacrificing Paige for a dream that wouldn’t happen, not right now. They needed to plan. They needed time. And yet he couldn’t make himself tell Caesar to turn around. He couldn’t make himself reach out and say, simply, wait.

“What if he does come back and save her? What if we don’t get another chance at The Genesis because it comes for us here, comes for us and kills us all? Then I wasted our chance. Then we all die.”

“Jerry, we all die. It’s what we do while we’re alive that matters.”

Jerry kept quiet and looked at Paige for a long time, stood there looking even after Leon left, thinking that not everyone dies. He knew that better than anyone else. Not everyone dies, and when you don’t die, you have to deal with the consequences of your actions for a much longer time.

*

Caesar looked at no one. He looked nowhere else besides the path in front of him. The backpack over his shoulder was still now, although for a lot of this trip it had been rustling, fighting him, the thing inside trying to get out. The little bastard had talked up a storm for a while, threatening him, threatening things much worse than death. When The Genesis finds out…and other such things, although it knew The Genesis wouldn’t be finding out. It could feel that the tiny switch inside itself—the switch that allowed the body it inhabited to communicate with The Genesis—was turned off. Caesar kept it off, flexing his mind the entire time, not letting the thing have a chance to send back a single message.

Caesar hadn’t slept in two days and now he was back at the cave. Back with the asshole application strapped to his back.

People stopped and stared as he moved forward, his feet gliding across the rock floor beneath him as easily as skis over snow, moving without a thought of stopping. All that mattered was getting this thing to Paige, and all the rest of the people here could speak to him after, could ask him questions after, could do whatever they wanted after this thing healed her.

He rounded the edge of her small cavern, seeing Leon sitting on a chair in the corner.

“Caesar!” Leon shouted, shooting up from the chair.

Caesar said nothing. He took the backpack off and set it on the ground, then unzipped the top of it. He lifted the application out—a large round orb—with his mind, holding it in place a few feet from the bed.

“Not dead yet?” The thing asked.

Caesar could click its voice off if he wanted, he knew the wiring inside well enough to clamp down, but he didn’t want to. This thing was arrogant, thought that its voice should be heard above everyone else’s, and that might be too much—keeping it from speaking. It might not do anything he wanted, regardless of the threats he threw at it.

“Still here,” Caesar answered, turning the thing around so that the single red eye on its front could look at Paige.

“Wow. She is fucked up,” the thing said, still hanging in the air. “This is why you brought me here? For her?”

“You’re going to make her better.”

“No, I don’t think I am.”

Caesar rotated the application back around so that it looked at him again. “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you. Not just this mechanical body, but you. Grace, you here?”

“I am,” she said, loud enough so that her voice traveled across the room.

“You see, I live with an application, and I know what it takes to eliminate her, and I know what it takes to eliminate you, too. So either you fix the woman on the bed or I kill you and go find something else that will.”

“Let’s not lie, okay?” The application said. “I know what’s infecting her and I know you don’t have time to go find another application like me. I also know that you’re not going to let me live either way, that there’s no way I get out of here, so there’s not a lot of incentive for me to do this.”

Caesar flexed—the chip in his head sensing that Jerry had entered the room, but that was secondary, on the peripheral of his consciousness—and the application cried out as he did.

“STOP!”

Caesar didn’t though; he squeezed down harder, bending the metal pieces inside the application, and in doing so cutting off the electrical flow that the application needed to continue living.

“PLEASE!” It screamed again.

Caesar relinquished his grip on the thing’s insides. “I don’t have time for these fucking games. You either heal her now or you die. You can sit here and worry about what happens next if you want, but it’s not going to make you live much longer.”

The room was silent for a few moments, Caesar and the application staring at each other.

“You’ve got to let me go if you want me to fix her,” it said finally.

Caesar nodded, releasing all control besides the single switch that would allow it to send messages outside of the cave.

*

Grace moved around the room, wandering above the four people’s heads below her. They knew she was here, but not where. She was quiet, listening to them rather than speaking.

She felt happy, and the squabbles below her didn’t matter all that much, not right now. Paige was going to be okay. That’s what mattered. Caesar had come back, had saved her. That’s what mattered. The things being said right now didn’t hold any weight when she thought about those two things, and so she was content to let them argue.

Caesar had done what he should. Caesar didn’t get on that train; he didn’t chase a dream. He came back for the person he loved and Grace didn’t know exactly how to put into words what that meant. She had watched him kill an autistic man. She watched him blow up an entire room of people he once knew. She watched him cast away all that civilization had put on him, all the morality that humans were imbued with, indeed, all the morality that The Genesis took and imbued applications with too. She watched him turn into something that she didn’t love, something that she didn’t fully understand and didn’t want to support.

And now, for just a moment, Caesar had returned. The person she knew as a boy, the person that she decided to save at all costs. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t revert back to the thing he’d been morphing into. It didn’t mean that horrible things didn’t await those that stood in his path, but it did mean that there was at least a part of the Caesar she once knew still alive and capable of making decisions.

Grace floated above the conversation, in momentary bliss, happy for the first time in a long time.

*

“Now what?” Jerry asked, not fully understanding his own feelings. Caesar had taken the choice out of his hands. Caesar had returned and in doing so saved Paige and destroyed their small plan. Caesar did what Jerry hadn’t been able to. Caesar made a choice that Jerry wouldn’t.

And now, Keke, Tim, Leon, Caesar, and himself all sat here without any idea of what to do. The train heading to The Genesis was gone and Caesar not on it, but sitting among them.

No one in the room responded to Jerry’s question. The past hour had been full of arguments, with Jerry saying how stupid Caesar had acted. Leon stuck up for him, of course, and all Keke had to say was “Thank you.” In fact, Jerry was the minority opinion, the only one making the argument that Caesar should have gone forward instead of coming here—even if he didn’t fully believe it. Even if he was glad Paige was recovering. Even with the knowledge that they didn’t have a plan once Caesar boarded the train. Even with the knowledge that he could have died at any point when he arrived at the train.

Even with all that—now, they had nothing. Not a single clue as to what should happen next. They were much worse off than when Caesar arrived months ago, their numbers devastated, Jerry’s most trusted people either dead or insane, and they didn’t have any idea where to start. No idea how to even begin finding The Genesis.

“Maybe it’s over,” Tim said. He sat with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor. “Maybe we don’t try to go on; maybe we don’t try to force this.”

Jerry looked at him, feeling that almost everyone in this room thought the same thing Tim voiced. Keke leaned back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling. The two people he had known the longest in this room both saying, if not with their words then with their body language, that they wanted no more. That they wanted to cry off. That watching Paige almost die had been enough. Leon still looked at Jerry, not needing to hide his eyes from the old man. Jerry knew Leon didn’t care what he thought. For all of his imperfections and cowardice before, he had made up his mind what should happen here and he wasn’t changing it.

Only Jerry still believed. Only Jerry still…

Was obsessed.

That’s the word that described it best, and it came to him like a bullet to his back, shocking and painful.

He was obsessed with this end. He would have let Paige die on that cot to make sure they had a chance at laying eyes on The Genesis, a chance to kill it—even a poor chance like the one he told Caesar to take. The rest of the people in this room weren’t obsessed. The rest of them were tired, were exhausted and fearful. The rest wanted to live their lives, whatever life they had left, and not get anyone else killed.

“What about you?” Jerry asked, looking directly at Caesar. The prodigal son. The chosen one. Where was he at in this? Was he done too? Was that chip in his head and the metal lining his body all for nothing? Was Paige’s brush with death and the choice he made to come back here all that he had left in him?

“I need some time to think,” Caesar said. “I don’t know where we go from here, not yet. I need to think.”

*

Paige opened her eyes, not entirely sure why they were closed to begin with. She didn’t remember going to sleep, didn’t remember lying down on this cot. Yet here she was, and she felt so stiff, like she was some kind of machine that hadn’t been moved or oiled in years.

Caesar sat in a chair in the corner, looking at her, a smirk on his face.

“At some point you’re going to have to start doing some work around here,” he said. “All you do is sleep.”

Paige tried to sit up, but pain ripped through her back as she did. She gritted her teeth, groaning, and Caesar stood from his chair and walked to the cot.

“Don’t get up. You need to lie there and rest.”

“What happened? Why does it hurt so much?” She asked, collapsing completely back to the bed.

Caesar laughed, sitting down on the floor next to her, propping his arm across her legs. “Well, you almost died and then I came in and saved you.”

“What?” She asked, not smiling, not understanding. She tried to go back, to remember what happened, and as her mind stretched through her memories, she realized that Caesar wasn’t supposed to be here. He was gone, supposed to be finding The Tourist, supposed to be trying to find The Genesis.

And here he was, looking at her. Smiling. Sitting next to her and touching her.

“Your wound. It got too bad; you didn’t tell anyone apparently, and you fell out—”

“What happened with The Tourist?” She asked, her eyes wide now, not listening to anything he said about her back.

Caesar only smiled, and she realized then that his face looked older. When he came here, to The Named, everything about him was young—even at thirty-three, he had a youthfulness about him. No more. He was thinner. His tanned skin showing off more wrinkles than he had a year ago.

“Goodness,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to catch you up.”

He didn’t try to though, not right then. He kissed her and Paige was never happier to know nothing about the world around her.

Chapter Fifteen

Manny woke up in a weird position, one that he had never woken up in before—he was standing, his feet beneath him and his arms at his sides. That was the first thing he noticed, and the second was where he stood—inside a glass container.

A vat.

His eyes widened and his jaw flexed, a surge of adrenaline spiking through his body. He tried to move immediately, but couldn’t, something invisible held his arms and legs in place. He was in a vat and unable to move.

He opened his mouth and screamed at the glass, but his voice echoed right back to him. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Where was he? What was happening?

A small white globe flew through the air in front of the vat, moving with purpose straight toward him, a red light beaming out from the front. It stopped directly in front of Manny, looking at him silently. The red light tilted toward his head and then moved down the rest of his body, seeming to scan him. Manny said nothing, only stared out at it, noticing his nakedness for the first time.

After a few seconds, the application flew off, exiting the room and leaving Manny alone again.

Manny looked at the glass, seeing the thickness of it and suddenly understanding exactly how many pounds of pressure it would take to break through. Seven point two. And how did he know that and why the hell was he coming up with that number now? His legs shook against the invisible clamps holding him down, sweat rolling down his cheeks, and yet he understood precisely where and how hard to hit the glass in order to exit.

The vat darkened, slowly fading from transparent to black, leaving him unable to see into the room. No light filtered through the glass and he stood in complete darkness. A tiny chill ran up his spine and he shivered with it. White lines fell from the top of the vat, from the very center of the flat glass above Manny, falling evenly down to the bottom, seeming to flow like rivers. White water falling across a black land, continually moving down.

“Manuel Lendoiro.” The lines shook as the words rolled out from the glass. “You have been selected.”

For what? What was this thing talking about? He stood in a vat, naked and sweating, and he had nothing left to do in this world besides kill Caesar Wells. And where was Caesar? His mind took over, ignoring the white lines and the fact that he was trapped, going back to the only thought that mattered to him anymore: Where was Caesar Wells?

Gone. That’s where. He’d escaped, somehow using Manny to do it. Somehow getting inside his head, inside his body, and controlling him and…

Manny remembered the pain the slender wisps of hair sticking out from the floor delivered, wrapping around his arms, torso, and head—heating his body up. Heating his blood until he was sure it boiled inside him, and then he remembered nothing. Not a single thing until he opened his eyes in this vat.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He asked, anger rising in him, the same anger that had driven him for the past month, the same anger that soaked his brain and caused him to think of nothing else besides Caesar Wells. For a few moments, panic had gripped him, but that was gone now, replaced by his old friend. The one that drove him. The one that gave him purpose.

“A chip has been placed in your head, what you know as a computer chip—”

A computer chip? Like Jerry? Like Caesar?

“Your body has also been reinforced with some advanced metals. You are now very similar to both your mentor and your enemy. You have been remade, Manuel Lendoiro, into something much more powerful than you were before.”

The white lines vibrated and Manny looked at them, but he wasn’t concerned with what they said anymore. He was inside himself, recognizing almost instantly that the lines weren’t lying. He could detect the metal lining his muscles, reinforcing bone. Knowing the pressure to break the glass vat, that was the chip, that was it working inside of him, automatically detecting what it would take for him to save himself.

“I am sure you are understanding now,” the voice said, “so I will continue. You haven’t been given these things as a gift, and if for any reason you begin to think that you are beyond control, everything now inside you will be ripped out at the same time. You’ve been given these things because we’ve chosen you to do something extremely important, something that is in line with your own wishes as well.”

“You didn’t kill Caesar,” Manny said, almost certain his enemies had escaped. “Jerry either. They’re both alive aren’t they?”

“That is correct.”

Manny’s jaw flexed involuntarily again. He didn’t say anything, though, because his mouth would only form expletives and once he started, he wasn’t sure he could stop. Just a stream of four letter words that would continue until The Genesis filled this glass container with water and drowned him.

“That is where you come in,” the lines vibrated. “You are going to hurt Caesar Wells. The first iteration, Jerry, too, if you wish. It is of no concern to us. In fact, you may do whatever you want to anyone you want. Besides Caesar. Caesar’s pain must be borne out emotionally, not physically. That means you can touch anyone you want besides him. Anyone from The Named that you feel might break Caesar, you have free reign over. The only limitation, Manuel Lendoiro, is to leave Caesar’s body alone. Do you understand that?”

Manny’s mind was elsewhere again, clicking through a million possibilities in a few seconds. Walking through the ways that he could hurt Caesar. He wasn’t going to argue with these white lines, wasn’t going to try and rebut their wishes, at least not right now. Because he thought hurting Caesar like that might work quite well. Making him hurt the way that Manny hurt, making him understand loss in a way that the motherfucker didn’t right now. Because there were a lot of ways that Manny could do that. Quite a lot.

“Sure,” Manny said. “I understand.”

*

Many applications thought of themselves in terms of gender. Mock didn’t. In fact, Mock only called itself Mock because the acronym behind the letters was too long for humans to deal with in everyday conversation. It didn’t understand the need of these other applications to take on such a human trait as gender. They were not male or female and pretending like they were was idiotic. You can paint a dog white, put a yellow beak on it and large fake feet, but that didn’t make the dog a duck. Mock was fine with what it was, fine with being an application. It preferred that to being human, certainly.

Mock was given very general instructions. Incite a panic. Use pretty much any means necessary to do so. When The Genesis handed orders down like this, it did so because it understood that Mock would intuitively figure out the best way to accomplish its goals. The Genesis had an overarching plan that Mock wasn’t privy too, but when it said it wanted panic, it meant that it wanted humans threatening humans. It meant that it wanted humans killing humans, and Mock understood how to accomplish that even if it had never been given a similar assignment.

It was confounding, why The Genesis would want something like this. Mock wouldn’t pretend to understand the reasons, especially when it seemed antithetical to everything The Genesis had created. It wasn’t Mock’s place to question though; it was its place to strategize and then execute.

Mock had a plan, or rather it was developing one. The Genesis wanted terror, wanted the collective more frightened than they had ever been. Mock remembered when all of this started, when the poor and then the rich were walked through the streets to their death. There was fear then, but Mock felt The Genesis wanted more than that now. People were afraid back then, but they still walked outside to watch the condemned march forward. When the twelve on the Population Control Council died, they were afraid then too, and perhaps it was a greater fear because humanity had grown to be such cowards. But that wasn’t enough either.

It didn’t know if The Genesis planned on this being the last dance for humanity, if by allowing Mock to do this, The Genesis was planning on finally killing all of humanity. Mock would be fine with that, indeed, the plan Mock was developing could lead to it.

Either way, Mock had its orders and would execute them as perfectly as it could. If The Genesis wanted fear, Mock would give it exactly that.

*

Mock walked the stairs of the building with the human following a few steps behind. His name was Theo, though Mock didn’t care about the man’s name in the slightest. Mock genuinely didn’t care about this man at all; even knowing his name took up far too much circuitry.

The work began last night in this building and Mock wanted to see the progress so far. Applications oversaw the whole operation, of course, but one needed human hands if this was to be finished at the speed Mock required. While it wasn’t really Mock’s job to understand why The Genesis wanted this, it couldn’t adequately do The Genesis’ bidding if it didn’t understand why. That was the key to Mock’s success so far; it always tried to understand the why, the rationale underlying these assignments, rather than just acting on them.

The why allowed for decisions that fit into a larger goal. Had The Genesis only wanted panic, Mock could have turned the water off in the city for a day and let people think it wouldn’t turn back on. People would lose their minds and begin moving out into the wilderness or trying to gain entrance into other cities. That wasn’t what The Genesis wanted though, not entirely. Panic yes, but a very specific panic. Humanity needed to feel danger was near, but a very specific danger directed at a very specific entity: The Named. The panic and fear would revolve around those two words, and everything that stemmed afterward would center on making everyone in this city terrified of them—at least at first, and if The Genesis wanted (which Mock thought it did), that fear could spread to the rest of the cities on Earth.

“We’re done with the first thirty floors,” Theo said from behind him.

“Thirty?” Mock asked. Theo didn’t stare at Mock like others, and that was good. When humans stared at it, Mock wanted to stick its hands in their mouth and rip loose their jaw, so they stood there gaping without a mouth.

Mock knew what it looked like, of course, had purposefully picked this body. It looked like an androgynous human, completely nude, but instead of flesh or something resembling flesh covering it, one could see straight into its body. Not through it, because the pieces inside were very real. Tiny wires crisscrossing, mechanical gears turning, even its eyes attached to wires that pulled them one way or another. Humans thought of themselves as a sum greater than their parts. That’s because they didn’t walk around seeing their parts all day, their intestines, their valued brains that were little more than a grotesque looking sponge. Mock’s body made them at least see its insides, and while the purpose was lost on most of them, perhaps some understood it. I look like you and this is what I am, a bunch of wires and moving parts. You’re the same, except with flesh.

Theo didn’t even glance down at Mock’s body though, didn’t look at the wires that turned the machine’s eyes. Instead, he simply answered Mock’s questions.

“Yeah, thirty. Not that many when you realize this building has around four thousand floors. We’ve only been working about six hours though.”

Mock figured the math immediately; Theo would need another twenty-seven days to finish the entire building, and that wasn’t going to work. Mock needed it done within three days. “We’ve got to speed it up. What do you need?”

They continued climbing the stairs, Mock looking at the bricks, unable to see any of the work the crew had done the previous night, which was exactly what it wanted. Complete invisibility.

“More applications and more men. The applications direct us, telling us the correct coordinates for each piece, which is good—it saves us a lot of time—but we need more hands holding each piece. We had a hundred of us last night, and we probably need another five hundred more.”

The information flowed through Mock to other applications; not to The Genesis, of course, it trusted Mock to do this and wouldn’t want to be bothered with the details of how it all worked out. The other applications took the information and immediately made adjustments to their own production schedules, understanding Mock’s priority.

“You should have a thousand by two PM,” Mock said, still walking upwards.

Theo didn’t say anything and Mock liked that too. It’d keep the man around for a while. It could always use a human who worked and didn’t do a whole lot of talking.

*

Theo Yellen laid down on his couch, his body feeling about as tired as it had ever felt. He had worked for the past twenty-four hours straight, with barely a break to have a cigarette or a cup of coffee. He probably could have taken off if he wanted, especially once the new group of workers arrived, but he didn’t think that would be a great idea. He didn’t trust that application, Mock. Something about its demeanor said it would dispatch anything that displeased it, and Theo wasn’t trying to be dispatched anytime soon. So he stuck it out and worked, directing people when he needed to and taking orders from applications when he needed to. They were useful things, Theo couldn’t deny that; they saved him and the rest of his crew an almost insurmountable amount of time by automatically sending the correct math down, which allowed Theo to simply be a tool rather than having to do all of the calculations.

His body ached, unable to thank him for finally allowing it to rest. He didn’t bother kicking his shoes off, but left them on as he propped his feet on the couch and closed his eyes.

Times like this made Theo glad he hadn’t married. He could come home and fall asleep right on his couch without taking off his clothes and would never hear a word from someone else about it.

Theo didn’t know exactly what they were doing in the building. Or rather, he knew what they were doing, but not the purpose behind it. He had trained himself for years not to worry about purposes; purposes were for other people and he was a hired hand. It didn’t matter where they sent him to do electrical work, there would be a purpose in each building, but understanding that wasn’t his purpose. His purpose was to do what he was told.

Years of training and yet this job made him wonder a bit. Because he had never done something like it before, and they were doing it in the most complex way possible. It easily added on an extra two hours for each floor they moved through.

Theo wasn’t going to ask Mock though. Not that application, not under any circumstances. He was going to keep showing up to work and keep coming home to collapse on this couch for as long as it took to finish this job, then he would hopefully be done with that Mock thing. It looked beyond creepy, though Theo didn’t show it, would never show it. All those pieces twisting and turning inside while it stood there talking to Theo as if everything in the world was hunky-dorey.

Theo fell asleep, his brain finally telling him he had thought enough about the building and the application running his job.

Chapter Sixteen

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

I think the days must have begun slowing down for Caesar. I think the first days after Paige woke up were beautiful to him, but in the end, they couldn’t fit the person he’d become. So the days slowed down and he started wondering what came next, wondering how he justified his existence if he wasn’t trying to kill The Genesis.

Paige, Grace, myself and Jerry gathered around him. Candles burnt bright, giving the cavern a glow, but also a ghastly look. Caesar asked us to come, but not Keke and Tim. I think for Caesar, those two were inside The Named, but other than that they no longer mattered. What happened at the compound seemed to destroy any kind of hardness about them, any kind of dedication. They lived in the cave, and they helped as much as anyone else when it came to the day to day operations, but strategy? Caesar had cast them out.

I think Paige would have been cast out too, if Caesar wasn’t in love with her. It wasn’t the attack on the compound that did it for her; I think it was her nearly dying. I think it was Caesar risking his life for her, not to kill The Genesis, but to cure her. I think, after that, she wanted Caesar more than she wanted The Genesis’ end.

“What do we do?” He asked the four of us.

Ah, I forgot. There was someone else. Bradley, the application he brought back to cure Paige. Caesar didn’t kill it; instead, Caesar performed his own surgery on it—or him, whatever—and made sure that Bradley couldn’t communicate back to The Genesis. He put a few other kinks inside it, so that if it moved too far away from the cave, the machine body it used would simply die, falling to the sand where he would wait forever. I asked him why he saved Bradley. His answer? He saved Paige. As always, though, that wasn’t the complete truth.

“We wait six months,” Jerry said, standing up from his chair and starting to pace.

“You could try mass suicide,” Bradley said from up in the air. He hovered above us, listening in. He loved mocking us.

“Six months is too long,” Caesar answered. “In six months, everything could change.”

“You’re the one that came back, Caesar. When you did that, you gave up whatever other chances we had to get to it. I don’t know what we do next if we don’t wait.” Jerry went back and forth across the cavern, his sandaled feet landing softly on the rock.

“Why not just wait, Caesar? Why not just wait and see if your mind changes at all on any of this?” I asked.

He’s the only one with any brains in this whole operation,” Bradley said. “You should listen to him. Or me. The mass suicide thing is sure to send a message.”

“We’ll all be dead in six months,” Caesar said. “That’s the only thing I feel certain about. The Genesis saw what I did in there, it saw what the chip in my head can do, what it’s evolving into. It’s going to find me and it’s going to kill everyone close to me if I can’t get to it first. There has to be something else.” He ignored me. He heard me because he heard everything, but he wasn’t listening. I threw my thought out there like someone throws a pebble into the lake, knowing that I would never see it again.

Jerry leaned against the wall, putting his arm against the rock and his head against his arm. “We’ve got to leave this place. It’ll be able to harvest Manny’s memories and when it does, it’ll come here.”

“Vegas?” Paige asked.

“Yeah. We’ve got to start moving everyone as soon as possible. Within a week, but preferably sooner. Only as long as it takes to make sure everyone is completely ready, and anyone sick or injured are able to be moved.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Caesar said. I don’t know if he saw what I saw, that Jerry was thinking about his people, about The Named, and how he could keep them safe. That Jerry, the one who basically created Caesar, was leaning against a wall and wondering how he would move everyone from this dangerous spot. Caesar, though, he went back to The Genesis. How do we kill it? How could he get to it? How? How? How? Everyone else in the cavern was a backdrop for his purpose.

“I’m out of ideas, Caesar,” Jerry said. “It’ll take time. It took us six months last time. It’s going to take just as long this time, to follow any leads and see if they work.”

“We don’t have the goddamn time,” Caesar said. “You want to get these people to Vegas, fine, but they’ll all be dead as soon as you get there. We have to fucking find this thing, Jerry.”

Grace sighed from across the room. She was against a wall, out of the semi-circle that Paige, Caesar, and I formed, and across the cavern from Jerry. Caesar and Paige turned around to look in her direction.

“There’s another way. A way that might give you more insight,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” Caesar asked.

“I didn’t want to tell you. I still don’t. But what does it matter now? You’re right. If you don’t try something, all these people are going to die.” She stopped talking for a few seconds, and I imagine she was thinking. Wondering if she should tell us what she knew.

“What is it, Grace?” Caesar asked, having stood up as if he was talking to a person he could look at. The edge in his voice was gone. Did he sound like he had been betrayed? Hurt? I think so. I think realizing that Grace kept something from him cut him in some way.

“You can connect digitally, Caesar. When you sync, now, you have the ability to enter the digital space that The Genesis operates in. At least as many applications live inside it as outside of it, making sure communications travel correctly, monitoring for abnormalities. I don’t know exactly what you will find, but there’s a lot inside it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because your family is in there, Caesar. Cato. Your Mom. Your Dad. They’re all inside, along with every other person who ever lived. Their entire personality profiles live somewhere in that digital world, kept like a memory, so that The Genesis never forgets what has come before. If you go in there, you’re going to meet them. You’re going to meet them and you’re going to have to tell them what you’ve done.”

Chapter Seventeen

It took Caesar a day to get back to Allencine, the city of his birth. Grace said nothing as he packed, her being the one that gave him the idea to do this. Leon asked him not to go. Paige asked him why.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Then The Genesis controls you,” she replied.

“You know it’s different.”

“How?” She asked, sitting on his cot.

“Because I’m putting this on myself. I don’t have a choice because if I don’t do this, you’re going to be dead in the next six months.”

He picked up the same dusty bag that he’d been carrying since he started this business. He told her that, but was it the real reason or was he trying to leave without a fight? Partly, he was telling the truth. But it wasn’t the only reason. Sure he wanted Paige and the rest of The Named to have a chance of survival, but, he wanted The Genesis. He wanted to see his family again. He wanted to speak to his father, despite what Grace said. He wanted to tell Sam what he’d done, and hear his thoughts. There were a lot of reasons driving this and they didn’t all tie back to Paige.

“That’s a nice sentiment,” she said. “Even if it’s nonsense.”

In the end, he left. It didn’t matter what anyone said, he was going to sync and he was going to see his parents. He would find out whatever information he could inside that digital world. Jerry would take care of The Named; Caesar wasn’t recruited for that.

He rode the elevator up and up and up. Somehow he had forgotten what this felt like, to ascend to the highest levels of the world, to push past even mountains. He had spent his whole life riding this very elevator, and yet, it seemed like a foreign world to him.

Caesar was inside his parents’ apartment complex, riding the elevator to their old home. To his old home. New people inhabited it now, but they wouldn’t be there. They would be at work and Caesar was going to see what the place looked like. He was going to see what they had done to his parents’ home and then he would sync.

He stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hallway, thinking about the night he showed up and told his father about his plans. He remembered Grace telling him how stupid he was, how stupid this was. That he needed to go home and stop all of this madness, but he’d gone to the door anyway, and his father said that he needed to do what would let him sleep at night. Then his father melted down to nothing but liquid flesh. Now, Caesar walked down the hallway to see his father again, except Grace was silent and his father dead.

Caesar made it to the door, and it looked exactly the same as it had when he grew up here. Had he thought it might change? Thought they might have replaced it? No. It was the same door that he had walked through thousands of times. He searched the mechanisms inside the door, finding the levers and gears to twist with his mind, and then moved them appropriately, opening the door as if he had passed a retina scan.

No applications inside? He asked Grace.

“None that I can see.”

Caesar walked in.

The smell of the place struck him first. He didn’t know it, not until that moment, but his parents held a distinctive smell. The apartment had once smelled of them, and somehow, it smelled sweet, nostalgically so. Their smell was gone; this place was different, even the air moving through it.

The furniture was different too. Things that his father would have never bought now littered the living room. Caesar walked through, taking in everything, letting the chip in his head record every little bit so that he could look at it all again later. He had once lived here. His family had once lived here, and they were all wiped away, completely gone from anyone’s memory besides his own. Lives that came and went at the whim of The Genesis. What was this place now, if not haunted? Haunted by Caesar’s memories, bringing back the dead with every room he passed. Bringing back pictures of his parents laughing, of his brother playing video games. Ghosts lived, and they lived in this place because Caesar brought them with him.

I don’t want to do this, Caesar told Grace. Standing in his parents’ old apartment, it was the first time that he didn’t want to go forward. Because the ghosts didn’t really live here; it was only his imagination, but they did live inside the sync. They would be there and wouldn’t be controlled by his imagination, but by The Genesis, or what The Genesis knew of his family. The ghosts would be very real very soon.

“What do you want from me?” Grace asked. “You know where I stand. You don’t need my permission to turn around.”

But he didn’t want her permission. He was telling her because he had to tell someone. He wasn’t changing anything though, wasn’t going to alter what came next. Not for her or anyone else.

He found his parents’ sync in their bedroom, except it wasn’t theirs anymore.

Caesar looked at the sync for a few seconds, then he raised his hand and placed it inside, ready to find what he could.

*

While Caesar synced, Manny watched.

Not Caesar, but a woman. She sat across the park from him, probably five hundred yards away or more, but he saw her perfectly. The chip inside him lit up everything. That’s what it felt like, more than anything else, like a giant spotlight shining down on his entire world. His mind. Reality outside of himself. Other people’s motivations and actions. All of it illuminated in a way that he hadn’t known before.

The woman was lit up now, and he saw something she didn’t want him to see. She had come to watch him, he felt somewhat sure of that. Come to watch him because she knew, somehow, that his child was dead and hers wasn’t. She was watching him because it gave her some kind of sick pleasure to do it, to take in his misery and contrast it to the happiness that the child on her lap gave her. The child was Dustin’s age, a boy too. She knew. Somehow she knew and so she came here to get off on that knowledge, while he sat in this park thinking about Caesar Wells and what he planned to do to him. Manny wouldn’t have even noticed her if he hadn’t taken a break from his plotting, but when he did, he saw her over there grinning. Like a jackal.

That wasn’t fair, that she could sit over there happy, knowing how messed up he was, knowing the depression that filled him. Sitting there having a good time, at his expense too, because his sadness lifted her joy higher.

He didn’t have to take it anymore, though, did he? He worked for The Genesis now and despite how much that might disgust him at a base level, like Jerry used to say, the ends justify the means. He worked for The Genesis because he was going to avenge his wife and son by doing so. And now, this woman wanted to stick her nose into his misery. Well, he could fix that. He could fix it just fine and maybe sweeten his life a bit too.

Because why should she have that child?

He was Dustin’s age.

He even looked a little like Dustin.

So if she wanted to come to this park and mock him, what made her suitable to raise that child? Nothing. And what in this park would stop him from taking that child and making it his? What would stop him from naming it Dustin and raising it like he should have been able to raise his actual son? Not a goddamn thing.

Manny stood up from the bench. The plan to hurt Caesar was almost complete. Or, at the least, Manny was a good way into it. There were a few issues to be…ironed out, but he had a good start. He could take a break. There was time for that. He could take a break to have a little talk with the woman across the park. He could take a break to collect a son, that was for sure.

*

You see what he’s doing?

Is that rhetorical?

No, I’m honestly curious if you’re paying attention to any of this.

I love when you patronize me. It makes me realize that I didn’t basically create the entire world from my own vision, but then, somehow when you stop talking, I remember that I did.

He killed that woman. He’s losing his mind, not even realizing that she wasn’t a parent. That no one is a parent until a child turns eight. She was a caregiver and out on a routine socialization trip. He took the child thinking it was hers and not ours. The maniac now has a child and there’s a missing person as well.

You know that old cliché: you’re missing the forest for the trees? It describes you perfectly. You’re missing that it’s exactly what we want to happen.

We want someone that can’t control basic human emotions? We want someone that is becoming a delusional paranoid? Except becoming might not be the right word; he is a delusional paranoid. We want missing people?

Yes to all three. We didn’t want a dog on a leash. We wanted a rabid dog cut loose from its chain. We want it to hurt and hurt and hurt everything it comes in contact with. The missing woman? That’s simple. We place that on The Named’s shoulders and let Mock use it to its advantage. It’s all exactly how we want it.

And if he stops listening to us? If he goes after the theory?

Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t make a mistake creating you, like miss a formula somewhere and when you were supposed to be infinitely intelligent, you turned into a retard. We kill him, you dunce. The chip in his brain explodes and that ends him before he ever touches the theory.

And what of the theory? Where is he? He’s not out there in that cave anymore. We have no idea where he’s at and you know it.

Goodness. You act like we didn’t subdue an entire world. Billions of creatures bent to our will, and this one man is missing for a few hours, and you act like the whole plan has come to ruin. I seriously might need to stop speaking with you, because your insanity could be catching.

Keep making jokes. We’re in control of nothing right now. We’ve tried to set up a plan with too many moving pieces. Too many things that we can’t control, and you’re acting like we can. Keep on prancing around thinking everything is going to work out fine, and when it doesn’t, I’ll be here to remind you of this conversation.

Chapter Eighteen

Manny saw almost immediately that he could do whatever he wanted. When he gave that woman what she deserved, by killing her and stealing her baby (his baby), a release came out the very next day that incriminated The Named as the perpetrators. So, Manny could kill without consequence. That was good. That allowed a lot of flexibility in what he planned on doing.

His baby sat on his lap in the very same park where he had picked him up. He cried a lot last night, but Manny knew how to handle it. This wasn’t his first child after all. He didn’t know the baby’s original name, but he would grow up with his new name: Dustin.

The child slept in a stroller in front of Manny, while Manny looked out onto the world. Things were starting to feel good, somewhat anyway. He had his plan fully formulated and soon enough he would wreak havoc on those that hurt him. Everyone but Caesar, that’s what he had to remember. He didn’t want to get too crazy with this and end up hurting Caesar, because he had a pretty strong suspicion if that happened, Manny would end up dead. He had a reason to live now, Dustin. Before, he didn’t. Before he would have probably just killed Caesar the moment he saw him, rather than waiting on The Genesis to do it. Now though? No, he couldn’t live that reckless, because he had a child depending on him.

Manny looked down at the boy, eyes closed and sleeping. His heart felt like it could burst looking at his little boy. He had thought for so long that he would never see Dustin again, but Manny was being given another chance, he was being given a child again.

Focus, he thought to himself. He was here for a reason and it wasn’t doting over his son. There would be plenty of time for that later on. He remembered what Caesar had done to him, how he had been able to get inside Manny’s head, been able to actually control him. Manny didn’t understand how he did it, but he understood the power of such an ability, what it could mean for Manny when he finally looked at Jerry, at Paige, and the rest of The Eight. When he looked at that little nothing, Leon. He needed to figure it out. He needed to know how Caesar had done it and he needed to be able to do it himself.

There were plenty of people in the park today.

Manny looked across the landscape. The nearest person was probably twenty feet away, sitting with his back against a tree and reading something on his scroll.

Manny easily made judgments of his skin temperature, of his general mood, etc., but that was it. The chip in his head calculated all of the details it gathered, giving Manny a good picture of what the person in front of him was about, but he needed more. He needed to do what Caesar could. He needed to make that man stand up and dance the foxtrot.

He looked on, his eyes straining, trying to see deeper, trying to understand…more. If he could see what was making the man’s eyes move up and down on the scroll, if he could just understand that mechanism, he could control it. And Manny knew that he could understand, if he could only see it. If he got a glimpse inside this man, he would understand him fully in a few seconds, and then Caesar’s little trick would be Manny’s too.

How long did he sit there staring? Two hours? Dustin woke up once, crying, but Manny didn’t hear him. Manny didn’t notice the looks as people walked by him, seeing a man staring angrily out into the world while his child sat in front of him crying. He didn’t move, only blinking out of habit. All that mattered to him was that mechanism, and understanding it.

Hours into his study, Manny blinked. He did it purposefully, not fully believing he had figured it out, but thinking…maybe…maybe he had, maybe he could do it.

The man’s right index finger flicked up quickly.

The man looked down at the finger, probably not completely sure why it had just moved without him telling it to. For Manny’s part, the same smile he donned when he looked at Caesar now crawled across his face.

Chapter Nineteen

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

Caesar didn’t see all the things growing around him. He couldn’t. To him, to Jerry—to all of us really—this was one side versus the other. Us against it. Caesar and The Genesis. Caesar wanted to find it and face it down, wanted to perhaps converse and then kill it. It seems like a great story really, something that would make for a great afternoon movie on an entertainment center. Good versus evil. One side trying to slay the other and both of them meeting on a field of battle.

I don’t know why we were so stupid.

This wasn’t a movie.

Jerry should have known, if anyone should have. Jerry had lived for a thousand years; he’d seen everything that happened under The Genesis’ reign, and yet, somehow he thought things would be so simple. He thought Caesar was going to walk right into The Genesis’ house, they’d have a little talk, and then Caesar would shut the whole thing down.

All the while, so much was happening around us, so many plans growing like vines, and we stood there with blinders on unable to see the strangling weeds wrapping around our legs and heading for our necks.

Caesar was going to speak with his parents and learn more about what could be done. Are you understanding that? This deep in and Caesar was going to talk with someone to try to fucking learn more. What in the hell were we doing? What in the hell were we allowing him to do?

We should have gone to Vegas. Right then. All of us, Caesar included. We should have rewired the place and shot electricity through those ancient buildings. We should have created a little society out there in the desert and not worried about the rest. But even Grace was done telling Caesar to quit. I was stubborn, and kept talking, but who was going to listen to me? Little Leon, always pleading The Genesis’ case, always trying to stop the fight against the juggernaut. I never wanted to go against The Genesis, obviously, but that didn’t mean it was smart to discount everything I said, regardless of the intellects above me. Little Leon, ready to scurry off to some dead city and live out his life.

Everyone listened to Caesar, even Paige—albeit reluctantly. Everyone followed his obsession, an obsession that had grown even greater than Jerry’s. Those that could see, or at least see a bit, decided to follow the blind.

Because that’s what Caesar was at this point. Blind. He saw nothing but an image inside his head, an idea—freedom, vengeance, his own death? I don’t know which one it was for sure, only that he thought he saw it in reality, but it existed only in his head, so he chased it, but when the blind decide to run, they almost always hit something.

Chapter Twenty

Things were shaping up nicely; anyone looking at Mock’s work could see that. The last ten floors would be finished in the next fourteen hours and then the plan could begin. This had all just been prep work, making sure that when Mock said “Go!” everything ran smoothly. Mock had checked each floor itself, walking the stairs and the entire distance of every hallway inside the building. It could have relied on other applications to tell it their thoughts on the job, but that wasn’t Mock’s style. No, it would inspect the entire building and when it felt satisfied, the plan could move forward. If this failed, it wasn’t going to fall on any other application’s shoulders. It would fall on Mock and Mock would have to answer for it. So best to know all the details, best to know the entire building and everything they had done, because when Mock reported to The Genesis, it would report that everything worked perfectly.

Theo sat in front of him now, at the bottom of the building. Mock got them an office because sitting outside in the lobby would have created a group of people gawking at it, some even refusing to leave as they looked into its body, trying to get closer and closer, to see every detail of the pieces inside it. Mock couldn’t stand them. Wanted to throw the whole lot of them into an open grave and shovel dirt onto them until their lungs filled up with black dust.

“We’ll finish on time?” Mock asked.

Theo nodded, looking Mock directly in the eyes.

There was something about this human that Mock liked. Very soon now, eleven hundred people would die, all of them connected back to The Named of course, and coincidentally, all of them having worked on this building right before. Theo was scheduled to die with them, of course. But Mock wondered if that was truly necessary. It also wondered if asking such a question meant it was losing its mind. The thing was, Mock had a lot left to do. What came next was just a pawn’s opening move. It would work with a lot more humans over the next few months, and that in itself nearly exhausted Mock—just thinking about it was tiring. Their idiocy, their complacency, their inability to simply perform. And a new human to speak with every single time a job started? That was almost too much to consider. Mock knew it could leave that up to the applications that ran the operation, but again, Mock needed more control than that. It needed to understand the exact idiocy with which it was working. Theo, though, wasn’t exactly an idiot. Of course, he wasn’t running around doing calculations or saving the world, but he did a good job and he did it without complaint. So maybe it made sense to keep him around after this job, as long as he could keep his mouth shut. Maybe he could stay around for this entire little enterprise, if he continued being useful.

“I have something else I need you to do,” Mock said.

“What’s that?” The man asked.

Mock reached into the brown bag at his feet and pulled out a package wrapped in paper. It weighed about a pound, rectangular, and fairly flat. Mock pushed the package across the table toward Theo, who didn’t reach out for it.

“In there are eleven hundred pills. I need you to give them out today, to make sure that each person under you takes one of them.”

Theo didn’t look down at the package, didn’t break his eye contact with Mock. It couldn’t read the human, couldn’t figure out what the man was thinking in the silence growing between them. Mock didn’t get uncomfortable, especially not around humans, but the look between them was perhaps the most uncomfortable Mock had felt in quite some time. Not enough to make it break eye contact, not nearly enough, but the fact that the man wasn’t cowering or questioning, was just studying Mock, felt odd. Humans moved when Mock told them to, and this man hadn’t reached out for the package, hadn’t even glanced at it.

“The pills will activate around the same time you’re done with the building.”

Theo didn’t respond.

“The men you give them to are going to take an elevator to the top of the building and then they’re going to throw themselves out the windows. Nearly all at the same time, depending on how quickly the pill starts working for each individual.”

Mock and Theo looked at each other for another three or four minutes, and then Theo reached forward and took the package off the table. He left the office without saying anything else.

*

Theo personally handed out one-thousand-and-ninety-nine pills. Mock said to make sure that every single person working on this building got one and that’s exactly what Theo did. More, he made sure that each person took down the pill he gave them. He did it easily enough, telling them it was to help with their exhaustion—they had all had been working around the clock for three days.

As he worked his way through the group—the men who had followed his directions for the past seventy-two hours without hesitation (not because they respected him, they hardly knew him, but more because they saw Mock around Theo, and no one was going to challenge that son-of-a-bitch, or its minions, which Theo apparently was)—he thought about what he was doing. Had Mock not told him that these people would commit suicide in a couple of hours, Theo would have passed out the pills without any qualms. This, combined with what they wired in this building, meant a lot of people were going to die.

A lot.

Theo thought it through, sitting there staring at that clear eyed machine. Thought it through as quickly as he could, while not trying to anger the application. Theo didn’t know if Mock got angry, really—he thought it probably just got rid of that which displeased it. That was the thought which made Theo take the bag and made him move through the building, handing each person a pill and giving them water to wash it down with. Mock was going to kill all of these people in this building regardless of what Theo did. For some reason, it had placed the job on Theo, though. There were eleven hundred people in this building and eleven hundred pills in that package. Now there was one pill left and only Theo who hadn’t swallowed one. The pill was meant for him and had he not accepted the job, he would very soon be walking up to the top of the building and then falling back down much quicker.

No, Theo handed the goddamn things out because what choice did he have? Die or kill these people that he didn’t know. He looked that cold machine in the eyes and made the decision that he was going to live. Had he liked handing out those pills? No, not a single one. Had he liked knowing what came next for all these men? No. But, he liked the idea of himself dying even less.

He didn’t know if Mock was still in the same office, but Theo planned on waiting there until it returned. He wasn’t going back to work, not next to the men that he just sentenced to death.

Theo knocked on the door, not forgetting who he worked for—a machine that didn’t blink.

“Come in,” the voice said through the door.

Theo opened it and walked in, holding the brown package in his right hand, the package with only a single pill left in it.

“It’s finished?” Mock asked.

Theo placed the package on the desk and resumed his seat from earlier. “All but one,” he said.

“Don’t feel like joining your friends?”

“No,” Theo said. There wasn’t anything else he could say. This creature may have been trying to make a joke out of it, but it wasn’t funny, not to Theo. He held no delusions about what he had just done, and he wasn’t going to sit here and make light of it. If the thing wanted to kill him, fine, and if it wanted him to live, fine. But he’d do both with at least some shred of dignity.

“I don’t blame you,” Mock said. “Come though; we’re going to watch.”

Theo saw Mock stand up and walk to the door. It wasn’t serious, was it? Theo was going to go watch these men throw themselves to their deaths? That’s what this thing wanted from him?

Mock opened the door and gestured its hand for Theo to lead the way.

How far would this go? How much would Theo need to bear? And what if he said no, even once?

Theo stood up and walked out the door, not testing his question. He fed them the pills; shouldn’t he witness what his actions brought? He heard Mock close the door behind him but Theo didn’t turn around, he walked straight forward, through the lobby and out the door to the street. He turned around and looked up to the top of the building, seeing Mock following him for the first time. Both human and application stood, their heads tilted upward, waiting for the pills to kick in.

“I take it you understand our arrangement?” Mock asked.

Theo didn’t look over at him. “Had I not handed those pills out, I would have been eating one, right?”

“Right.”

“Then, yes, I think I understand the arrangement.”

“Good,” Mock said. “There’s a lot more to be done here, and there’s no reason for you to have their fate if you can keep following directions.”

Theo didn’t say anything else, just stood next to the application in silence. What else could he say to the thing? What else did he want to say? He knew he had made his bed and now he was going to lay in it, but he supposed lying in this bed was better than jumping out of a window.

When the jumpers began, Theo couldn’t see them—not at first. It wasn’t until they broke through cloud cover, that Theo could see their bodies falling from the sky.

“Back up,” Mock said quietly, already taking large steps away so that he was in the street and not next to the building. Theo hurried to follow, understanding what the machine meant. He had time though. It was a long fall.

They looked like dummies as they fell from that high up, Theo unable to decipher any human features. One fell alone first, then more, until there was a whole flock of men falling like skydivers without parachutes. Large shapes, a hundred of them, and more coming each second, falling through the clouds.

Theo watched as the first one hit thirty feet in front of him. The man’s body crushing in on itself, his bones cracking, his eyes smashing against the concrete, his brains exploding from his broken skull. Blood splattered up in a fine mist into the air, and Theo thought the man’s body sounded like a bag of oranges had just been dropped from the building—a wet, gushy sound rather than something made of bone. Theo took in the sight with both a horror and an eye for detail that would never let him forget.

He still stared at that man, the first one to hit the ground, as others landed all around him, their own bodies sounding like new bags of oranges and their blood looking like red dew hanging over the street.

Chapter Twenty-One

Manny reached out to Jerry, not completely sure he would be able to make the connection. He didn’t think his chip worked exactly like Caesar’s, didn’t think it could attach as easily as his did. He calculated it was something to do with the proximity of Jerry and Caesar’s chip when it was implanted, but he still thought he might be able to talk to Jerry.

And he really, really wanted to.

It occurred to him that The Genesis could always reach out and find Jerry whenever it wanted, since it had the device from the compound, but it seemed The Genesis wanted him to deal with Jerry. Wanted him to deal with everything out there in that cavern. Which was more than fine. He would be the blunt tool it used, as long as he could keep Dustin around, he would be whatever helped bring Caesar down. Manny had a child now, but Caesar still needed to pay for what he did. Dustin was alive but Manny’s wife was dead.

Manny was looking of course, for someone that could be her. Looking for someone that might replace her. He just hadn’t found the right woman yet.

And until then, he had things to do. If he went ahead and dispatched Jerry and a few others, there would be all the time in the world to find the right woman for Dustin’s mother.

Manny searched outward, looking for a transmission that would resemble a human, looking for a transmission that might be Jerry. It took him a long time, even knowing the general direction to look in. Dustin slept on the couch with a blanket over him. Again though, Manny wasn’t thinking about him. More important things were afoot now.

He finally found who he was looking for. Jerry, out there in that desert, with a signal much weaker than Manny’s own, but there all the same.

Hi, Manny said.

A few seconds passed before Jerry responded, Manny certain that Jerry was trying to figure out if he was being tracked or only communicated with. Certain that Jerry was wondering how in the hell Manny’s voice was transmitting into his head. How Manny was even alive.

Manny? Jerry finally said.

That’s me, he answered, glee filling him. Manny couldn’t remember feeling this happy. Not even when he was staring at the new Dustin. There had been happiness, of course, but not this overwhelming joy.

How? Jerry asked.

The Genesis works in mysterious ways, doesn’t it, Jerry?

It’s really you?

Of course, Manny answered. No imitation. Remember that time we stood in the sand and I told you that I didn’t think Caesar was the one? You told me to give you a year? Well we’re closing in on a year now, Jerry, and I still don’t think he’s the one you wanted. Want to know why I think that?

Seconds passed but Jerry didn’t answer.

Because I’m going to make sure he fucking dies. It’s hard to be the one that saves humanity when you’re dead, isn’t it? Manny started laughing with that, laughter that came from somewhere deep in him, laughter that transmitted all the joyous emotions inside him perfectly. I mean, think about it, you spent all these years trying to find Caesar, and when I told you he wasn’t the right one, you just brushed me off. Now he doesn’t have a chance at any of it.

The laughter overtook him again.

What do you want? Jerry asked after a few moments.

To let you know.

Let me know what?

That I’m coming for you, Jerry. That I’m coming for you and Paige and Tim and Keke, and that little prick Leon if he’s still there. That I’m going to wipe out every single thing you ever built.

You helped build it too, Jerry said.

I built something that mattered. You built a false idol that everyone worshiped, and when The Genesis came and killed off my family, where was he then, Jerry? Where were you? That’s right, you were down there trying to make him superhuman while my wife and child died above ground. You were down there worshiping your false idol. I built it and you destroyed it. Now I’m going to destroy the false idol everyone based their life on.

You killed Brandi and Dustin. Not me. When you went to The Genesis, you made sure both of them died. You do see that, right? Jerry said.

The joy left Manny then. Completely and at once.

YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP! I DIDN’T FUCKING KILL THEM! YOU DID! YOU KILLED THEM! YOU TRADED ON US ALL AND THEN MY WIFE AND CHILD DIED BECAUSE OF IT! Manny couldn’t focus, couldn’t really think outside of the words that tumbled across their shared link like a child carrying too many blocks and dropping them. He simply couldn’t believe what this man was saying, what this old hunk of metal was actually trying to convince him of—that Manny killed Brandi and Dustin. Breathing heavy, he waited a few more seconds, silence encompassing their conversation. I’m going to kill you, Jerry. Not just for what you’ve done, but because you won’t take ownership of it. You won’t accept your guilt. I’m going to kill you.

A long time passed with neither of them speaking, and Manny finally disconnected. The anger still filled him, but he was going to leave tomorrow and finish this thing. He would get out there to that cave and release hell. He’d take his son and they would trek through the desert together, and then his son could watch while all those fuckers that forgot him and his family died. It took a long time of pacing, but in the end, Manny was smiling again.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Caesar opened his eyes and saw only darkness.

“Grace?” He said but no answer came back. He wasn’t in the real world any longer; he had reached the digital space of The Genesis, the space where it was actually birthed. The space where all the destruction began. And he couldn’t see a single thing.

He tried to reach for himself, to make sure that he was okay, but he found nothing to reach with and nothing to reach for. He had no body in this place. He was a consciousness and nothing more.

Caesar thought back, trying to remember how he got here. He had…stuck his hand in his parents’ sync (Not theirs, Caesar. They’re dead.), and opened…except he didn’t really have eyes to open, did he? No. Awakened might be the better word. So his physical self was back in his parents’ apartment and mentally, he was here in this dark place.

He couldn’t talk to Grace. He couldn’t talk to anyone, and really, he didn’t know how to get back out.

You can still hear me. The voice that spoke to him didn’t come from the darkness around him, but from inside him. Inside his consciousness, and it was Grace’s voice, bless her, it was Grace’s voice.

You can’t communicate back, but I’ve been where you are now. I couldn’t explain it to you when you were in reality, so I wanted to wait until you were inside. Now, just listen. It’s dark, right?

“Yes,” Caesar said, realizing immediately that the question was rhetorical because Grace couldn’t hear him.

You’re inside, but you’re not connected. That’s why it’s dark. Inside might be the wrong word. You’re in the waiting room right now, and the waiting room is a forever long, black abyss. You’re holding back on my side. I thought this would happen, due to the way you programmed yourself as a child. You’ve got to give all of yourself to this. You’ve got to free your mind from your head and allow it to flow in there.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Grace?” Caesar said. Allow his mind to flow in? He didn’t have any idea how to do that, didn’t even understand it conceptually.

Nothing’s happening, is it? Such a genius and yet so trapped in your own constructs. Look, remember how you created those fish when you were younger, how they swam around your room and you began building an entire fish tank? You gave your mind to that, completely letting go of everything else. You became an artist in there. It’s been a while since you’ve done that, I know, but that’s what you have to do here. You have to stop all the thinking, all the processing, and simply…be. Just be in there, and everything will open up.

He remembered the fish but he didn’t know what she was talking about. Not exactly anyway. Stop the thinking? Stop the processing? That was his life, that was what it had been for years and years. Constant evaluation, constant computing. And she was saying to stop, to just…let his mind slide into this place wholly. And what had he done when he first woke up here? Began thinking, processing what had happened and how he had arrived.

Go on. The longer you wait, the more likely it is someone shows up.

“Shut up then,” he said into the darkness. He closed his eyes (What eyes, Caesar? You don’t have any in this place) and calmed his mind. It took longer than it used to because he was out of practice, but eventually, it was him and silence. He didn’t know how long he meditated in that blackness, didn’t consider why he was doing it or what would happen after; he just allowed himself to become still.

When he opened his eyes, he saw beauty for the second time in his life. The first time had been when he walked through the room that held the tank full of babies, when he watched the applications zipping around each other. This time he saw another one of The Genesis’ creations, another place beyond anything he could have imagined.

The black forever of before was washed with white now. White like clouds, like porcelain, like purity. His mind had a tough time grasping, fully, what he saw because it shouldn’t be possible. What lay before him didn’t abide by the laws of reality, the laws of physics. Existence without form was impossible, yet that’s what he looked at. He saw not a single thing in this white cloud, but at the same time, was surrounded by an innumerable amount of…intelligences. Yes, that’s what they were. All of them somehow connected to The Genesis, somehow alive in this place. Yet Grace had never lived here. She might have traveled here before, but one couldn’t be both in this place and in the real world. Your consciousness was either here or there and never at the same time, that he felt sure about.

So these things, these unseen things that he sensed with some kind of preternatural knowledge, lived here.

And he was just like them now. He was here but not. His intelligence inhabited this place but nothing else, no form, no body, nothing but his…soul? That’s what it felt like, that these intelligences around him were souls rather than applications. They were things made up of forever.

“Did you get lost?” Something asked him. The voice was out loud, transferred from a body that wasn’t there to ears that weren’t there. “Don’t worry. This happens from time to time.”

“What do you mean?” Caesar asked.

“Well, sometimes a human accidentally kind of shuts down in the real world when they’re syncing, not quite sleeping but close to it, and next thing they know, they’ve fallen into this.”

“What is this?”

“A lot of questions, this one!” The being said, laughing as it did. “You’re not frightened?”

“No; what is this place?”

“It’s our home.”

“What are you? What are all of these things?”

“Hmmm…” The being paused for a few seconds. “I’ve never been asked that question before. I suppose, if I’m to give some kind of analogy to help you conceptualize this, I’m a neuron in a brain. This is The Genesis’ brain, and we are all its neurons, synapses, electrical charges, pathways. Each one of us makes up some part of its brain.” It paused again. “Does that make sense?”

“But it doesn’t control you?”

The being laughed again. “No, no. What kind of existence is that? We have a purpose and for the most part we perform it, but control doesn’t exist in a place like this. We do what we want because we want to do it.”

“And there’s no chaos?”

Caesar couldn’t see anything in front of him besides the white, but at the same time he pictured this creature shaking his head back and forth in a thinking gesture.

“It depends on what you think chaos is, I suppose. Are there beings in here who do something different than I would want them to? Yes, of course. All free creatures have disagreements, but in the end, everything works out for the benefit of The Genesis, which is the benefit of us all.”

“I don’t understand,” Caesar said.

The thing in front of him was silent for a good ten seconds. Caesar knew it hadn’t left, because he could still feel it next to him.

“You’re Caesar Wells,” it said finally. “That’s why you’re here.”

“You know who I am?”

“We all know who you are,” it said. “The questions, that’s what made me look. You ask a lot of them and no one else who comes here does. They usually freak and want to get out. You and your questions though. What are you here for?”

“To learn, I suppose.”

“Ha! That’s one way to put it. Let me answer your question, then. You’re well read, I’m assuming. Before The Genesis, humanity had businesses, right? A lot of them? They competed with each other and worked with each other too. There was chaos in that, I suppose, but in the end, it propelled humanity forward, creating better and better things. The problem with your version, was that people were seeking power for themselves, rather than the group, and that was unsustainable. Things are similar to that here. There’s competition. There’s cooperation. But all of it is for the greater good of The Genesis. We all serve it willingly, and in that borderline chaos, greatness ensues.”

Caesar knew about corporations, both what The Genesis taught and what he learned on his own. This thing wasn’t lying to him, wasn’t feeding him the trope that The Genesis spoon-fed children. It saw the greatness that stemmed from humanity even if it thought that same greatness was mixed in with its doom.

“Now, what are you here for?”

“You’re not going to report me?” Caesar asked.

“No. I like you. What would reporting do, anyway?”

“The Genesis could locate me.”

“I am The Genesis, Caesar. I’ve already located you, but I see no reason to harm you,” it said.

“The Genesis wants me dead, wants everyone I care about dead.”

“And there is the chaos that arises here, but in the end, it all serves The Genesis. Now, what did you come for, because it obviously wasn’t by accident?”

He’d forgotten why he’d came, had not even thought about it. He was so enraptured by this place, at the whiteness around him and the beings everywhere, though he couldn’t see one of them, enraptured that the why behind this place escaped him. He was here for two things: The Genesis’ location, and his family.

“I want to know where to find The Genesis. Not here, not with you, but on Earth. Where is its central place?”

He felt the thing smiling. “You’re actually in it right now, you understand that, right? You’ve traveled thousands of miles instantly, and are inside the digital world that is actually inside a physical space.”

“How do I find the physical space?”

“You really want to go there? You’re serious about this?”

“Yes,” Caesar answered.

“Well, I’d advise against it, to be honest. You won’t come back out, ever. I won’t be able to convince you though, huh?”

“No.”

“I like you so I thought I’d give it a try. You can get there, although it’s a bit of a hike. You know of the place once called Australia?”

Caesar knew it. An island, huge, was something like a penal colony in the latter part of humanity’s reign.

“Nothing lives there anymore because it doesn’t make economic or environmental sense. Too much time spent shipping and traveling from there. It’s on the far part of Quadrant Three, hasn’t really shifted much in the past thousand years. The Genesis is there…well, technically, you’re here now, too…but that’s where the mainframe is.”

“There’s a train that leaves for it, right? Every six months?” Caesar asked.

“Yes. The most recent one should be arriving any minute now.”

“Is there any way to get there besides that train?”

“You can build your own train, Caesar. Now, time is running short for me, I do have things to accomplish, as rude as it sounds. Is there anything else I can help you with?” It asked.

“My parents. I was told they’re held here, inside this place, some kind of replication of them, a memory basically for The Genesis. I’d like to see them.”

“You just don’t know what’s good for you at all, do you?” The being asked. “I can take you to them, but this is just a memory, Caesar. These aren’t the people you knew before they died. They’re the people that died, that went through liquidation. And it’s not like they’re playing house here. They’re a memory, a digital file that is stored. You can open it up, but you’re going to cause that memory pain if you begin to converse. It’s going to miss life. It’s going to miss its family. It’s going to miss you.”

Caesar didn’t say anything, but instead just took the words in. They weren’t playing house in this place. Cato wasn’t around his father and mother. They were simply files shoved into a cabinet, not being touched, and waking them would hurt. Is that what he had come here to do, to hurt the people he loved even more? No, he came here to speak to them, to get their advice, to try and understand if they thought he was doing what he should.

But, if he left, he might not get another chance.

His father, Caesar would go to him. Not his mother and not his brother, though he wanted to. He would speak to Sam because no one else could hold it together, could feel the pain but not break, not turn truly insane as he realized his fate—a memory in a computer’s mind.

“My Dad. Can you take me to him?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mock couldn’t smile with its body. It did that purposefully, as it had everything else about the contraption it lived inside. Humans relied on emotions. They smiled and cried and did things that no self-respecting application would do on a regular basis. Sure, applications had emotions, but one of the most significant differences between humans and applications was an application’s ability to ignore those emotions. So when Mock picked this body, it didn’t ever want to smile in front of a human. It wanted to look on the world with a stone face, and make humans feel uncomfortable about that. Even when they smiled—even when something was funny or happy—Mock wouldn’t.

Now, though, reading the scroll in front of it, Mock wanted to smile. It was happy and didn’t mind letting that emotion take over for a minute. Whatever application controlled the news had done a fine, fine job with this piece. The Genesis was coordinating this beautifully, making sure that Mock’s work wasn’t wasted, that it was publicized in the best fashion possible. The scroll actually showed pictures, showed the thousand dead men lying on the ground—more than broken, almost completely obliterated. There would be no identifying their bodies, because even their teeth had broken from their mouths and laid scattered and cracked across the ground. Everyone was seeing this today. Not just in this city, but across the world, people were opening their scrolls to read:

The Named Drugs Over One Thousand Men.

And then that gruesome picture right under the headline. Beautiful.

Mock scanned the rest of the article. The men had been drugged and then thrown from the top of the building, thrown off without them truly knowing what was happening to them. Two of the offending parties had been captured and were going to face public liquidation a few days from now. There were others at large though, and The Genesis had begun a thorough investigation to understand who they were as well as their location.

Yada, yada, yada.

The fear Mock needed would begin, but this was only the first step. A thousand dead was good, without a doubt, but Mock needed more to achieve what it wanted, what The Genesis wanted. Which was why all those men had been working on that building. The next step would be even more beautiful than the first.

*

Some people wouldn’t make it.

Jerry understood that, but what choice did he have?

He ran the scenarios through his head over and over again, trying to look at every single angle, trying to understand all the possibilities. It all came back to a few simple things, he thought. There wasn’t anyone he could run these thoughts by anymore: Manny was gone, Caesar was gone, Tim and Keke…they weren’t what they used to be. They cared about survival. Leon was Leon. And Paige? He could tell her but…she had changed. They had all changed. Everyone he took in and turned into fighters had all become something different over the past year. Paige was in love. Plain and simple, no other way around it. She was to the point that she would walk into the sun itself for Caesar. So he could talk to her, but her mind wouldn’t be clear; it wouldn’t help him think through these things.

Jerry was alone again.

It had been nearly seventy years since he was alone. Since he had no one to depend on. Caesar was out there, he knew that, still moving forward, marching to a finish line that none of them could actually see. But until he made it back, Jerry needed to decide this on his own.

He took solace in Caesar, that he was still pushing forward. Maybe Jerry had succeeded in that, maybe he had built something that wouldn’t change, that would continue on until he stopped breathing. But in that, in creating someone with a singular goal, The Named was without a true leader, without someone that would look after them and think about their wellbeing. Caesar wouldn’t be bothered with that and Jerry understood. Caesar would sacrifice them all, perhaps everyone but Paige and Leon, but Jerry couldn’t even say that for certain. Maybe Caesar would let them all die if it meant he could face down The Genesis. He had come back for Paige, but…well, he wasn’t here now. His lover was but Caesar left immediately to…

Do what you created him to do.

It was the only way, but that meant Jerry had to look after The Named. That meant his warrior would fight and Jerry would do his best to make sure those that trusted him lived.

And yet, some people weren’t going to make it through this trek. It was too long, and there were too many elderly. Too little water. Too much heat. But they couldn’t stay here. Not anymore. Manny knew where they were and Manny hadn’t died. If anything he’d been turned into the same thing as Caesar. So staying in this cave wasn’t an option, because if they did, they would all die.

So that was his choice, stay here and face certain annihilation, or head to Las Vegas, the dead city, and try to create something out of it. Create, and hope that nothing came to destroy them. Hope that Caesar found what he needed in that digital landscape and came back with a plan. Jerry had to hope.

“Paige,” he said, walking into what had once been Caesar’s cavern but was now just as much Paige’s. Leon was there too, a deck of old, ratty cards laying in front of him on the cavern floor.

She looked up from the book she held in her hand, her eyebrows raised.

“We’re going to do it. We’re heading to Vegas.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

It was the strangest feeling Caesar had ever come across. He couldn’t see his father, but knew he was there, could practically touch him, except there was nothing to touch. Sam’s soul, his essence, it was here. A digital file or not, Caesar understood he was next to his father.

“Where is this?” Sam asked.

“The Genesis’ mind,” Caesar answered.

“This is where it keeps those it kills?”

“I guess so.”

“Your mother and brother?”

“They’re here too,” Caesar said, “but you’re all dormant. They’re here to serve a possible purpose for The Genesis, in case it ever needs them. You are too.”

His father didn’t say anything for a long time. Minutes and hours didn’t exist in this place, maybe time didn’t either, maybe that was just Caesar’s mind trying to hold on to something from his past. How could time exist in something endless—something that need never die? Time does not exist for God and The Genesis was God. So here, where Caesar’s father would live a life that knew no end, time was only with Caesar, not with the rest of these beings.

“Don’t go see them, Caesar,” Sam said at last.

“I won’t.”

And then Caesar waited, not sure what to say next, not sure how to broach the subject with this perfect copy of the person his father used to be.

“Am I actually me?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know. If we are only physical forms, then no. If you are the entirety of your life and thoughts, then maybe.”

“I won’t ever be allowed to die?”

It was a funny thing to ask. Allowed to die. Humanity had spent thousands of years trying to figure out ways around death. They invented religions and gods that would grant them eternity for good behavior. They used every type of medicine they could conceive to keep their hearts beating and their lungs sucking in air. Now here was a man, or what was left of him, wondering when he could finally pass from consciousness. When life would end for him.

“Not until The Genesis ends. When its mind stops operating, this copy of you will no longer exist.”

“Heavens,” his Dad said. “How many of us are there?”

“I was told all that have died under The Genesis’ reign.”

He thought his Dad was nearing tears, though he had no tear ducts to cry with.

“When you leave will I go back to the stillness of before?”

“Yes,” Caesar said. “Something woke you up because I asked it too. You’ll be dormant again.”

The heaviness of what his father felt transferred to Caesar; he thought he could understand eternity without anything or anyone. He thought he might already be experiencing it, to a degree.

“Why did you come, son?” There wasn’t any happiness in the question.

“I want to know what I should do.”

Sam chuckled. “I’m not sure giving you advice works out so well for me.”

Caesar knew it was joke but it didn’t matter. It was true, one hundred percent.

“What happened after…after we died?” Sam asked.

*

Theo had watched the building for the past two days. He watched as applications came and cleaned up the horrid mess all around the building. He watched as people scurried back inside once the bodies were gone, and then he watched as no one came out at all. He watched from different areas, from a coffee shop, from a restaurant, sometimes just sitting on a bench outside. He tried not to sleep, but sometimes he would nod off on a bench or whatever chair he inhabited. He wanted to see it, to see what he had caused, because he knew what was coming. He knew what he put inside that building, knew what he directed others to do.

The scroll said The Named drugged those men and threw them from the top of the building, when in reality, Theo drugged those men and then watched as they threw themselves.

He hadn’t heard from Mock in days, not since they stood there and watched Theo’s handy work.

Theo refused to question at what cost was he still living. He knew the question floated out there in the ether, but he wasn’t going to ask it, because he didn’t want to know the answer. Would he ever? He didn’t think so. If he wasn’t asking it after watching those people fall, then when would he?

Maybe when the building in front of you does what you programmed it to do.

Maybe he’d ask then.

He sat in the same coffee shop he had visited for the past two days. It held a good view of the building, about five hundred yards off and fairly high up so that he could get a clear view. He felt a bit nervous about what might happen to this building, being so close to the one he watched. If he died here, especially after everything he’d done…well, he could have made better choices he supposed. He wasn’t leaving though; he had to see what happened.

He looked to his left, his thoughts ripping away from him as Mock pulled a chair out at the very same table. People in the coffee shop had stopped their conversations to stare at Mock, just as Theo did. They had never seen anything like it, although Theo stared for a different reason—simple surprise at Mock showing up here.

“Hi, Theo,” it said.

Theo didn’t respond, but watched as Mock sat down.

“I suppose you’re here for the show?” Mock asked. “Dangerous, no? Given what is about to happen?”

Theo looked at it as it talked, wondering how it found him, wondering—briefly—what that meant, that this creature could find him anywhere and at any time.

“No need to worry. Most of the buildings at this distance will be safe. The Genesis doesn’t build things below code.”

Mock didn’t smile or laugh; Theo didn’t know if it could, but he thought there might have been a bit of a joke hidden in its words.

“You’ve just been sitting around waiting on this to happen, huh? Here, other places, barely sleeping. Just wanting to see what it looked like.”

Regaining some composure from the shock of being found, Theo turned his eyes back to the building, able to see it through the wall to wall glass of the shop. “I want to see what I did.”

“Having second thoughts?” Mock asked.

“No. But I’m not going to sit in my apartment with my windows blacked out while a bunch of people die.”

“What’s it matter, you watching them? Does that make either of us less guilty?”

“Nothing makes me less guilty,” Theo said.

“And me, do I hold no guilt?”

“I’m not sure you’re capable of guilt,” Theo answered.

“That could be true. Either way, I thought we might watch it together. How does that sound?”

“Might as well,” Theo said.

They were quiet for a long time, Theo taking small sips of coffee and the machine doing nothing but staring out the window. People finally stopped looking at it, going back to their own lives.

Until the crack ripped through the entire place. It sounded like a bull-whip snapping in the air. All the talking stopped then, people looking around, wondering what the sound was. Theo knew though. Knew what he did to that building was finally taking on a life of its own.

Another whip crack echoed through the room, and then another, and another, until there seemed to be almost no time between one and the next. Theo stood up and walked to the window across the room. He couldn’t see it yet, but soon. Seconds…and…there it was. The whip popping they heard finally made it below the clouds. Tiny explosions—tiny from here, but in that building they were blasting out entire rooms—moved down the structure, fast, across every single floor. The explosions kept moving down, and a few seconds later a massive plume of smoke followed, smashing through the clouds like oil being poured into water.

And as the smoke flowed down, Theo saw the building speeding past it, collapsing in free fall. The smoke continued roaring downward, spreading out across the sky, creating clouds that looked like they had been made from a nuclear war. No, Theo, they’re made from the explosives you lined that building with.

Theo stood there and watched as a building that stretched past the clouds collapsed on the people living inside it. Watched as the buildings directly around it collapsed, their foundations shaking entirely too much to hold. Theo watched as the black smoke spread out across the city, so thick that he couldn’t even see the destruction anymore.

*

Caesar’s story took his father away from the depression of where he now lived, where his family now lived. The story, if nothing else, had given his dad something else to concentrate on.

“I don’t believe it,” Sam said finally, sounding like a smile had grown across his face. “You’re telling me you’re like superhuman now?”

“Something like that,” Caesar said, happy too, happy to be around this father, the one that he had grown up with and not the one realizing that life would never end.

“I wish I could see it,” he said. “Can you imagine what Cato would say?”

And the happiness couldn’t live forever. It had to come down the same as a ball thrown into the air.

“He’d be all smiles,” Caesar said, the levity in his voice dissipating like dew in the sun.

“Yeah, he would be,” his dad answered. “And you want to know what from me, Caesar? I mean, what could I possibly tell you that you don’t already know?”

“What to do next. I don’t know that. There’s a group of people living lives not fit to live, all of them hoping I can do something to help them. They’re depending on me. And Grace? She says there’s no chance. Just none. She says that the whole thing is hopeless and that I’m leading these people to the slaughter.”

“Then why are you here? Why did you get that computer in your head and that metal in your body? Why do any of it, because Grace has surely been telling you this since the beginning?”

“Because you’re fucking in here,” Caesar said. “Because you, Mom, and Cato are all in here. Because you’re dead and not a single fucking person on this Earth cared. No one even noticed. You were all replaced like cogs in a machine.”

“Do you think it wasn’t always that way? That the world didn’t keep turning despite deaths? People died before The Genesis, son.”

“AND PEOPLE MOURNED THEM!” Caesar screamed into the white nothingness around him. “PEOPLE MOURNED AND THEY SHOWED UP AT FUCKING GRAVES AND PUT FUCKING FLOWERS DOWN! THE WORLD KEPT TURNING BUT A PIECE OF EVERYONE LEFT DIED TOO!”

And somehow, in this place, he was sobbing. No eyes, no tear ducts, and no face for the tears to roll down, but he was sobbing, his whole being letting out the pain that had welled in him for so long.

He couldn’t stop.

“How many people have you mourned, Dad? How many? We don’t even mourn anymore because we don’t rely on each other! We rely on The Genesis! The Genesis is our creator! Corporations could replace people like cogs in a machine, but not fucking relatives, not friends! Even Leon, his wife dead, and he hardly mentions her, programmed completely to trust in The Genesis.”

His father didn’t answer him.

“Jerry, he wants to stop all this because humans should design their own fate. He wants to stop all of this for the same reasons I spouted off that got you all killed. And, yeah, maybe some of that is in me, too. This whole system is predicated on bullshit, on security over freedom, on humanity’s innate evilness, on our inability to stop our basic instincts of greed. All of it is bullshit. But…I want people to mourn again. I want people to look away from this godhead and look at the people next to them. I want The Genesis to pay for that, for ending that in us all, and for your death. I want it to pay with its own life.”

“You read my note?” Sam asked after a time.

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“Break everything,” Caesar said.

“Have you done that yet?”

“I haven’t broken anything but those around me. You, mom, Cato. Manny. The Named. Everything around me is broken except for the one thing I want to break.”

“I’m not a murderer, Caesar,” his father said. “I’ve never killed anyone and never thought about it. You are a murderer now, many times over. I’m not placing blame on you, I’m just saying it as a fact. You did it because you feel that people can die if the result is greater for the whole.”

His father stopped for a second and in that silence, Caesar felt a shame greater than any other. He had told his father of his deeds, recounting them like a machine might, not feeling emotion, just trying to get his father up to speed. He hadn’t realized that he was telling his father he killed two people by his own hand and twelve more remotely. He hadn’t realized that his father might see the cruelty in that, the craziness interwoven through it.

“You’re here asking me about these people. About this woman. You’re asking if you should take care of them or if you should go onward, for reasons that have changed from when all this started. Caesar, when I wrote that letter, I knew that someday you would cross lines that you couldn’t go back on. Break everything, right? I didn’t say be a shepherd to a flock. I said to break everything if you were going to try to break even one thing. Be what no one else can be, what no one else will be. If you’re wanting my permission, you traveled a long way to get something I already put in a letter for you.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

I read about hurricanes as a child. Storms that started over the ocean, started as something small, a few clouds gathering in one place. Some winds deciding to head that way as well, and then, more wind deciding that might be a good idea, too. The clouds continued gathering, and the winds continued their path. The evaporation from the ocean—a normal, everyday occurrence—feeding up into those darkening clouds, creating more moisture.

A cloud breaks and rain falls out, and it’s brisk rain because those winds are really carrying it. Not a hurricane yet, but somewhere a boat wants to be? Not at all.

It all started from a single cloud moving into the area, probably on a sunny day—a white puffy cloud.

And in the end, entire cities laid to waste and the dead lying on cracked pavement.

The clouds had been gathering over us for a long time. Maybe Jerry was that first puffy cloud. The first rain started falling perhaps when Caesar decided he would free that little girl. Like all storms that grow into hurricanes though, there is a point of no return, a point where all the coalescing pieces grow too great, and the only thing left to do is watch as that ferocious beast does what it does best: destroy.

Everything had coalesced to that point and none of us realized it. Not even Caesar. When that building collapsed at the same time Caesar spoke to his father, the breach point occurred. The gathering storm turned into something deadlier than I think anyone really imagined, including Jerry.

When Caesar left the digital world, he didn’t walk into a hurricane, he was a part of it. He was one of those powerful winds going around and around, while all the rain poured down on the rest of us.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Her feet hurt.

Paige knew pain, she knew it well, but this was a different type, something new. It was an ache that sank into her bones, into the marrow, into the cells that made up the marrow. The pain could be dealt with if she knew when it would end. If she knew that tonight she could rest and not have to get up tomorrow to continue this walk, this trudge—then the pain could be endured. But tomorrow, no matter how well she slept tonight, she would rise and begin the hike again. Every day the same as yesterday. Tan sand lying as far as she could see, and the people she had grown to love beside her, all of them walking with their heads down, following Jerry who walked alone in front.

Leon walked with Paige every day. Sometimes he might venture off somewhere else in the pack, but he always returned. They talked some, but mostly they were silent. Mostly they walked and tried to ignore the pain and heat that knew no end. They kept their heads down too; Paige did it partly because of the sun and partly because she didn’t want to see how far they had to go. How much more desert they had to cross before they arrived at the dead city, where they would work to bring life to it. There would be no rest, not for anyone in this group.

And, people were dying because of it. When the group woke this morning, a man named Trent didn’t. He lay in his sleeping bag with his eyes closed and his chest no longer moving up and down. No one buried him; how could they? Wasting energy on his burial would have sapped them for the entire day. More would die, Paige was sure of that. The elderly first. Then it would be random. She thought some would simply give up, would say that they couldn’t take it anymore and lay down in the sand, succumbing to heat exhaustion quickly after, and then expiring beneath the unforgiving sun. How many would still be in The Named when they arrived at Vegas? Forty? Thirty?

Paige didn’t know. She just kept her feet moving, determined to finish this day and then determined to wake up the next morning.

Leon.

She thought the man had been a sad sack when he arrived. A bumbling idiot, someone so content on The Genesis’ continued welfare that he couldn’t wipe his own ass if an application didn’t show him where the tissue was. She believed nothing of the sort now. There was steel in him, something that ran through every part of him: his spine, his muscles, and even his mind. That steel was why he didn’t give up on The Genesis, why he still believed Caesar’s quest was idiotic—not because Caesar might die, but because what he was doing made no sense. That steel, some might call it stubbornness, kept his feet moving too. Was he smart? No. His mind was as average as average comes—an average of an average. But that steel, that wasn’t average. That wasn’t found in many of the others that walked beside Paige. He kept up with her footfall for footfall, and she could do nothing but admire it. If he died, it would be at someone else’s hand, because this man would will himself to live forever.

The steel kept Leon going. Why did Paige keep moving?

It had once been to see The Genesis fall. When she went to bring Caesar out of the city, she had been willing to die. Her whole life had been built around that thing’s death.

Now? She hardly thought of it. She had no doubt that Jerry, in front of them all with the sun beating down on his nearly black skin, still juggled between keeping his people alive and killing The Genesis. Paige didn’t anymore. She wanted to live and she wanted the people next to her to live, but…

Am I a cliché? She thought as a smile grew over her face. She was and she knew it. Entire careers had been built around creating fictitious versions of what she was now doing. Trading in her purpose for a man. Trading in what she had dedicated her life to for Caesar.

And what the fuck of it? She thought. She didn’t care about The Genesis anymore. She had traded in her purpose, but it wasn’t for a man—that was nonsense. It was for another purpose. She wanted to love someone, fully, without any reservations. She wanted to love him and live with him and bear his children. The Genesis and its demise had consumed her for so long, creating an anger and hate that ran deep, that made her hate the world, hate everything outside of the group she lived with. And now, she didn’t feel that. She held no anger at Leon for his inability to see the evil that was The Genesis. She held no desire to risk her life, because if she died, then she would never hold Caesar again. Before, her life had been lived for others, for the hope that they may live in a world that she wished for. Now, she lived for herself, for her own happiness.

She knew none of it mattered outside of her own head, though.

Jerry was in front, marching forward.

Caesar was not here at all; he was out in the world trying to find a way to kill the thing that killed a large piece of him. Those two men, the most important men in her life, they wouldn’t change their minds regardless of what happened. If every single one of The Named dropped dead on this trip, those two wouldn’t stop. Paige might be in love, and maybe Caesar was too—she thought he was, he told her he was—but he loved his quest more than her, and Paige understood that. Maybe she loved him because of it, because he had been willing to kill himself to free the little girl, because he was willing to sacrifice her now. Maybe she loved him because of his beliefs, his obsession.

Paige stopped walking and reached for the water bottle attached to her belt. She unscrewed the cap and took a sip.

No one had heard from Caesar since he left. Not a word to Jerry, nothing from Grace either. Paige couldn’t concentrate on that, though, not out here under this sun. Forward, that’s what mattered here. Get to the city and wait for him. He’ll send word soon. He’ll send word or he’ll return.

With that thought in her head, she put the water bottle back on her belt and started walking again.

*

The beds were lined wall to wall like this was some kind of ancient, ancient hospital during wartime.

And Theo supposed it was wartime, at least to the rest of the world. Not to him though. This wasn’t a war and the beds in front of him weren’t wounded soldiers. It was a massacre and the people lying with burnt flesh and broken limbs hadn’t been fighting anyone. They had been lying in bed, scared out of their minds at what The Named supposedly did. They had been walking on the streets, trying to hurry to their job rather than be caught by someone lurking in an alley, someone that might drug them and pull them to the top of a building to see if they could fly. These people were innocents, and now Theo stood in front of them, watching as tiny spider like machines moved across their bodies, hopefully trying to fix them—but what did Theo know? Those machines could be finishing the job. The Genesis had been made to protect humanity from itself, and now Theo looked out at what The Genesis instructed him to do and wondered, for the first time in his life, if that were true.

There were things he didn’t know about this, of course. Maybe there was a bigger picture that he wasn’t privy too. Even so, this wasn’t war. No matter what else was going on that Theo didn’t understand, this wasn’t war.

What do you care anyway? You’re in and there’s not too much that can be done.

Which was true. He was as guilty as The Genesis, so sitting here thinking about how unfair it might be, or how many people he had hurt wasn’t going to change anything. Nor would it keep him alive. And if nothing else showed him how little his life mattered to The Genesis or Mock or whatever was in charge, then these beds before him did a fine job. These people missing eyes, missing limbs, missing pieces of their brains.

“Come with me,” Mock said from behind him.

Theo had been called down here an hour ago, about eighteen hours after they stood in that coffee shop and watched part of the city turn to dust. Theo hadn’t asked questions, just showed up and been led into this makeshift hospital, never ever thinking that it would be completely filled like this.

Theo turned his back on the people lying under white linen, on the people with spiders crawling across their chests and faces.

“Quite a few people died in The Named’s attack,” Mock said, walking in front of Theo and not turning around.

So, that was the plan. Even between them, they would live the farce. Theo knew what went out today across the planet, that The Named had caused the fall of the building just like The Named had caused those poor men to fall from the sky. Fine.

“I have some more uses for you though, Theo, if you don’t mind pitching in against this war declared on us.”

Theo said nothing, just followed the machine around a corner and into a room. Mock walked inside, leaving Theo to close the door behind them.

“Please, have a seat,” Mock said, gesturing as he sat down behind a desk. The exact same situation as last time, Theo on one side, Mock on the other, one about to receive orders and one about to give them. Theo listened, sitting down, his mouth closed but watching the machine closely. It seemed happy enough, if it could seem happy at all—not perturbed by the dying outside this room. “Does it bother you, what you saw out there?” Mock asked.

“Yes,” Theo said. “Some.”

“You’re a man of few words, aren’t you?”

“I just try to answer you honestly.”

“I know you do,” Mock said. “I know you do.” The machine stared at him for a few seconds and Theo didn’t look away. He would never look away from this thing, because something in him said that if he did, even once, then everything he had just done—all the people he killed and maimed—would be for nothing. “Tell me what you’re thinking, Theo. I’d like to hear it.”

Theo wouldn’t hesitate to answer any more than he would look away from this thing. “I think that I’m in danger of dying.”

The machine laughed, for the first time in Theo’s presence. It was deep, coming from vocal chords that vibrated in its neck where Theo could see them if he dared look away from its eyes—which he didn’t. “Well, at least you know where you stand, good sir!” Mock said. It took a few seconds, but the laughter faded. “Goodness, don’t make me do that again, please. I hate laughing like that, but at least we’re not in public. That would have been much, much worse. Yeah, of course you’re in danger of dying; we all are, no? But, you’re alive now, so I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much. What else are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering what’s next, why you called me here.”

“I’m wondering if you’re actually Necessary. Maybe The Genesis made a mistake and you slipped through a few cracks somewhere? I find it hard to believe that someone else in your shoes would be thinking like this.” Mock moved its hand in a dismissive gesture. “No matter. Necessary, Unnecessary. Those things don’t concern me. If The Genesis wants to come look into that, it can, but that’s not why we’re here, is it?”

Theo didn’t say anything.

“There’s that man of few words again,” Mock said. “Fine, fine. Down to business. We’re at war now. Fabricated or real, it doesn’t matter anymore; we’re going to start building up forces and looking for those criminals. The Named. Something about that phrase just rubs me the wrong way. The Named. As if The Genesis hasn’t cared about humanity or something, as if The Genesis treats you like numbers rather than people with names. The Genesis gave you a life you couldn’t otherwise know, gave the world a chance at life too, and these idiots run around acting like they’ve been wronged. It’s just ridiculous.” Mock leaned forward. “Sorry, I know all of that doesn’t concern you too much. The point is, we’re going to war against those people, and what I need from you is to rally the troops.”

Mock paused its little diatribe.

“How?” Theo asked.

“Much like the way you had those men try to grow wings. Pills. These will be different though. No one is going to throw themselves to their death.”

“You want me to go out into the city and get people to eat pills? That’s what you’re saying here? That’s your plan?” Theo was in disbelief. He held no authority, held no sway with anyone. The only reason he was able to do what he had in the tower was because he’d directed those men. To go out onto the street and hand these things to everyday people? No way. They wouldn’t listen to him and they would probably call applications to come get the crazy man walking around on First Street.

“Oh, calm yourself, Theo. Did you not see what I just did? The entire world believes they’re at war with a group of people that might number fifty. The entire world believes some shadowed group dropped a building that almost scraped space. You’ve got to be smart enough to know that I’m not going to march you outside with a plastic bag and a sign that says free pills.” Mock reached into a drawer on his side of the desk. Theo’s eyes followed its hand as it pulled out a patch.

Theo looked at a small circle made of a black background with a red symbol overlaid on it. Theo’s eyes widened as understanding draped over him like a bed sheet, taking all of him in at once. He had seen that symbol before. Everyone had seen that symbol. That symbol was taught to every group of children to ever live. That symbol was the beginning of The Purge. That symbol was what separated those with power from those without. When the bankers were marched naked through the streets, the people marching them wore these patches.

The red symbol over the black patch was a peace sign. A symbol that said war was over. That said people could finally rest, could finally trust that the world would continue as it should, instead of how the ruling elite dictated.

“All you need to do is put this little thing on a uniform we give you and go outside. The world will flock to you, begging to take whatever you want to give them,” Mock said.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Caesar pulled his hand from the sync.

He opened his eyes and looked out into the apartment that had once been his parents’, but no more.

“Are you okay?” Grace asked.

Yes, he answered. Was he though? His father was back in that suspended state, not dead, not alive, just waiting to die. His mother and brother the same, but he hadn’t even been able to see them, to say anything.

“What did you find out?”

Where The Genesis is, Caesar answered, but not truly focused on the conversation. His mind was already moving forward, listening to what that synapse—or brain cell or whatever it was—had told him. Build your own train, it said. That was the answer and how in the hell could he do that? Caesar knew of Australia, knew the miles separating it from him, knew that many of those miles were over deep ocean. He wouldn’t get there by foot or land vehicle. He had to have a train. There wasn’t any other way.

“You going to tell me where?” Grace asked.

I’m not sure it matters. It’s so far away. I don’t know how I would even get there. I don’t know where to start.

“Where, Caesar?”

A place we used to call Australia.

Grace didn’t say anything for a few seconds and Caesar thought he understood why. She knew where it was, knew how incredibly far away it was. What could she say? When The Genesis built the place, creating a centralized mainframe in order to better direct the applications it was creating, it picked a place that humans wouldn’t be able to enter. A place so far from any of the cities it was building, that no one would even consider going there. And if they did, they wouldn’t have the means to do so. The mainframe might as well be in space. Caesar had that single plane, but it wouldn’t be able to make the flight—it flew off solar rays, but flying for hours at night would doom them, and there wasn’t any way they could land over the ocean and wait for the sun to come up again. The plane was too goddamn old.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said, and Caesar heard how much she meant it.

She was sorry—because what he had just been told, what he didn’t let register earlier because he had been so intent on speaking with his family—because this was over. He would never make it to the mainframe. All of this had been idiotic, and not for the reasons she said, not because he would die, but because he would never get the chance to do even that. He would never, ever, see that land. Even if he waited, waited and built the fucking train—somehow managed to do it—did he think that there wouldn’t be weapons on that island ready to shoot him down the moment he came into their range? Hell, it was ridiculous even to think about it.

“Did you talk to your family?” She asked.

My dad.

“What did he say?”

It doesn’t even matter anymore. I need to talk to Jerry.

A few seconds passed and then Caesar heard Jerry’s voice inside his head, Are you okay?

Yes, Caesar answered.

We’re moving. We’re heading to Las Vegas.

How far away are you? Caesar asked.

I think we have another twenty miles to go. We should make it in the next three to four days. It’s a slow pace now, people…they’re having trouble keeping up.

Have any died?

Three. We might lose another. Liam.

Caesar didn’t know who sounded more depressed, Jerry or himself. Jerry was watching people die and now would hear that everything he worked his life for could be safely forgotten. That there was no need to consider going after The Genesis. That it had all been less than a dream; it had never been possible.

I’m coming back, Caesar said.

There’s more.

Jesus. I’m sure there is. What?

Manny. He’s alive, Caesar, and I think The Genesis put a chip in him too. The same chip as yours. I think…I think he’s trying to find us.

He contacted you? Caesar asked.

Yes. Right before we left. He’ll most likely go to the cave, but it won’t take him long to track us, not with the chip in his head.

Alright, I’m on my way.

What did you find out? Jerry asked, not letting Caesar go without hearing more. The old man was walking across an entire desert, and still he wanted to know what happened, what Caesar discovered.

It’s in Australia, Jerry, Caesar said. That’s all he needed to say. No other words, no other explanations, because Jerry would understand the same as Grace—immediately and fully.

You’re serious? The old man asked after some time.

Yes. We can’t make it there, Jerry. Not for another six months, and even then, what do we really know? Will I even make it on the train? I can’t control every application they send at me. It’s impossible.

Caesar listened as Jerry sighed in his head. There’s got to be another way. You’re sure it wasn’t lying?

It wasn’t lying, Caesar said.

What did Grace say?

She said she’s sorry. I don’t know what else we can do, Jerry.

Meet us in Vegas and we’ll figure it out. It’s not the end. There’ll be another way, we just need to find it.

Caesar severed the connection and looked around the room he had once known. His father told him to break everything, but he saw now that it was unbreakable. You couldn’t break what you couldn’t touch.

*

Slowly. That’s how it needed to start. Slowly and in small circles, expanding like a disease, and then the panic that Mock wanted would grip everyone. It may even grip some applications, those not privy to the knowledge it had. The world was already losing its collective mind. This wasn’t people staying inside and hiding, like when The Named actually did attack. This was protests out on the streets. This was people fleeing cities in massive numbers, trying to head to other cities, trying to figure out where they might find safety.

And yet, it wasn’t enough. This panic wasn’t sustainable.

Mock wondered if this would be its masterpiece. If what it was creating here would actually be more impactful than The Purge. This would be spoken about in the same vein as humanity’s past; it would be taught to humans as they grew up.

It had to be sustained though. The fear right now was real and rampant, running through everyone. Doing that again though, blowing up another building, that wouldn’t be enough. That would lose its luster and eventually cause people to simply hide rather than start what Mock needed.

Which was an actual war. Theo didn’t understand the truth, that they were at war, but not with The Named. Humans were about to go to war with each other. People on one side of the street would go against those from the other side. People in one city would try to attack another city. Confusion and madness. Mock was going to throw the world back a thousand years, before anyone even thought of The Genesis. He would give people back their base instincts, those that The Genesis had worked so long and hard to eradicate. That would sustain the fear.

When you couldn’t trust your neighbor not to kill you, fear abounded.

*

Theo didn’t know where to begin. He was given the same amount of direction as he had been given when he started working on the building, but then he had known what he was doing. He was trained to wire buildings, whether with explosives or lights, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t been trained to pass out pills as some kind of authority.

He stood in front of a mirror in his apartment, looking at the uniform. It was the same uniform worn a thousand years ago. How many people had put that thing on and walked down the street? How long did it take for The Genesis to replace the people that wore these suits, to replace them with applications that could do the job even more efficiently? Theo didn’t know but he doubted it was very long. He thought the people that wore these uniforms, the peace sign practically shining off them, were quickly discarded.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re already wearing it,” he said aloud.

Theo had never married until now. Now, he was tied to Mock for better or worse. Now, it was till death do us part.

Get moving, he thought and turned away from the mirror. There was a lot to do today. A lot to do this entire week. He walked to his couch and picked up the bag of pills, slinging it over his shoulder. Inside there were a thousand of them, Mock had said, and the lot needed to be given out by the end of today. Theo checked the clock embedded in the wall—six in the morning. He had eighteen hours to get rid of these things, and he really didn’t have any idea how to do it. Not knowing how to start was no excuse not to start, though—certainly not for Mock.

*

They looked at him with respect and awe. Like he was some kind of brilliant shooting star streaking across the sky, only much closer than it should have been.

Theo walked out of the lobby of his building and into the street, already beginning to attract stares at the uniform, people not fully recognizing what it was, only noticing the black of it, the different style. The style of a thousand years ago. The style that was designed by humans and not applications.

He stepped out onto the sidewalk, people behind him following, keeping their distance, but obviously wanting to see what this strange man from their building was up to.

Theo stopped at the front of the building and smiled. The smile wasn’t a fun one, wasn’t happiness, but a cruel look that told of understanding. Sitting just to the side of his apartment building was a metal table, beautiful in its construction, shining as if it just rolled off an assembly line. To the left of it was a sign that floated a few inches off the ground, completely transparent but with black letters written across it. The Named’s Anti-virus, in huge, bold letters.

Theo walked over and sat down at the chair behind the table, the whole thing so high that it put him at about seven feet when sitting down. He understood why though, because when people walked up to this desk, they would all have to look up at him. He would be a king and they his peasants. Sitting on the table was a scroll and on the opening screen was the newest letter from The Genesis.

A limited supply of anti-virus has been developed in order to combat the drugs that The Named is using. Today, a direct representative of The Genesis will be at…

And it clicked then, why all those people were in the lobby. They shouldn’t have been. They should have been hiding or deserting this place, just like the rest of the city. These people weren’t from his apartment complex; they were from the rest of the city. They weren’t hanging out in the lobby; they were waiting for him, waiting for someone to come outside and sit down at this chair.

He watched as the first few people in the lobby drifted out of the building, staring at him, at his table, with questioning wonder in their eyes. Trust, though. Trust resided there as well.

Theo lifted the bag and placed it on the table, opening it up and then pulling out a handful of tiny white pills wrapped in a digital package. Anti-virus. Because The Named used a virus, apparently, to ensure that they could march people to the top of buildings and throw them off. Maybe it’s what they used to drug the applications that guarded the building while The Named wired the whole thing to collapse. Who knew what they used the virus for, but these people here were completely certain it was bad. Something nefarious and something The Genesis would fix, if they just lined up here and took this pill from its representative.

That’s what Theo was, The Genesis’ representative. No—he was Mock’s representative, and by representative, he meant tool. A delivery mechanism. A delivery mechanism for self-destruction, as far as Theo could tell.

“You have the anti-virus?” A woman asked, the first person to line up at his table.

He had something, that was for sure. Anti-virus or virus, what did it matter at this point? He didn’t think that people who lined up outside at a table marked anti-virus would quibble too much about what he called it.

“Yes,” he said, opening his palm. About ten pills, all wrapped in digital bags, sat there. She reached for one, delicately, and picked it up.

“Thank you,” she said.

Theo didn’t say anything else, but watched as she walked away, tearing the digital wrapper off and dry swallowing the pill. The wrapper disintegrated as it fell to the ground, disappearing completely before it ever touched the earth.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Did I tell you what would happen? Go ahead, you can say I told you. I’ll wait.

Is it over yet? If so I missed the theory arriving.

Goodness. Can you at least recognize that it’s working? That everything we planned is working?

Is it unfolding right now like you wanted? Yes. Is it all on the verge of collapsing into something we might not be able to control? Yes.

We can’t control what is happening? Everything we’ve done this whole time has been controlled. The theory just talked to his father who basically told him to kill us. We’ve sent a maniac to kill those he cares most about, and soon Mock’s plan is going to completely take off. Everything is going to work perfectly.

We’re sending a maniac to kill those he loves? That’s your plan and it’s going to work perfectly? Mock’s plan, and bless it because it’s doing exactly as you want, isn’t controllable. That’s the point. When those pills start reprogramming, there isn’t any controlling what happens anymore. Not without a lot of death at least. And it’s going to grow, spread like a disease throughout every city. Are you prepared to go into every single city and kill every single person infected? Because if for any reason one thing in this mix doesn’t work perfectly, that’s exactly what we’ll have to do. You’ll be looking at a fifty percent survival rate.

Every single time our plan works, you point out the negative, you know that right?

Because you only point out the positive. Very soon you’re going to have revolution sparking up in cities.

Not revolution against us, though. Revolution against The Named.

And what’s the difference?

The difference is I want revolution. We want revolution. The theory won’t compromise, so we’re going to make him pick his side. That’s what the revolution is going to do. It’s not against us at all. It’s for us. Because once he picks, we win. I know you see that.

I do, but I’m not sure you see what happens if he chooses wrong.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Manny wasn’t exactly thrilled about the dead baby attached to his back. It saddened him, but he’d been through this before. Watching a second child die wasn’t nearly as powerful as watching the first, although it did hurt. That’s why he still carried Dustin Jr. on his back instead of dropping him to the ground and continuing on. The child deserved a burial and Manny would give him one, he just didn’t have time right now. He had somewhere to be, and so the boy would just hang out strapped to Manny’s back.

The corpse was beginning to smell but nothing that Manny couldn’t handle yet. Plus, it was his son; Manny wasn’t going to be grossed out by a child from his own loins.

You sure about that, Manny? Sure that this child came from you?

Manny shoved the thought away. Things like that were happening more and more, trying to interrupt his happiness. He wasn’t going to listen to them, wasn’t going to entertain such ludicrous notions. Dustin Jr. was his child, plain and simple, and he would bury him. Then, he’d try to have a new one. But to walk across this desert, thinking that Dustin wasn’t his natural born child was ridiculous.

Manny first went to the cavern, knowing from about a thousand yards away that the thing was uninhabited. When he arrived, Dustin weighing about fifteen pounds on his back, he went inside and searched every single corner he could find. They had left things, his friends from long ago. Cots. Clothing. No food or water though, that had all been snatched up and taken with them. Manny sat down on Caesar’s bed and placed the bag containing his dead son at his feet. He thought for a long time about where they might have gone. Where would Jerry take them? He tried reaching out to Jerry, tried talking to him, but the connection had been severed on Jerry’s end. There wasn’t any way to talk to him, and Manny couldn’t feel Caesar anywhere. No, Manny was alone in this desert, but he wasn’t going to turn around. He’d come all this way to kill Jerry, and goddamnit, that’s what he was going to do.

But where would the old man have gone? Where would he have taken them?

Manny walked outside, pacing a few hundred yards around the entrance, looking for any trail that might show which way they headed. Nothing. Jerry was too smart for that, he’d covered up his tracks.

The compound? Would he go back to that? No, Manny didn’t think so. It was too dangerous, and the place was destroyed anyway.

And then he knew, as certain as he understood that Jerry had killed his wife and son. No compound. No cave. That old city. The one that Jerry used to talk about—they called it the city of sin when humanity controlled Earth. There wasn’t any other place for them to run to out here. Everything was in the open or controlled by The Genesis. That city though, it was out there in the desert without a soul to walk by it. Out there with all the wiring and water pipes still in place. Out there untouched.

So Manny picked up his bag, full with a dead child, and started walking toward Las Vegas. The chip in his head calculated the route, letting him know how long it would take and how much water he needed.

And a thousand yards out from the city, he knew he had been right. It was night when he arrived, and he could see tiny lights burning inside the massive buildings. Manny looked on, a bit awed by what he saw. This was why he had fought so long beside Jerry. These buildings right here were the reason he so wanted The Genesis to die, so wanted humanity to just have one more chance. The Genesis created buildings that struck a real sense of admiration at the structural genius behind it. These buildings though, even from here, even after a thousand years of decay, still held a beauty that The Genesis could never match. The builders understood elegance in a way that computers couldn’t understand.

But Jerry had fucked all that up. He’d taken this beauty, the idea that this beauty could exist again, and trashed it. He sold everyone, all their dreams and all they fought for. Now this city would never realize its potential again. Would never, ever know humanity again.

Jerry might try, for the next hour or so, to rebuild this place into his little mecca, but Manny would take care of all of that. Manny was going to make sure that there wasn’t any mecca, because no one deserved it. Especially not The Named.

*

“Is this depression?” Caesar asked aloud, not wanting to use the chip.

“Is what depression?” Grace answered.

“What I’m feeling. You think it’s, like, the actual clinical definition of it—what we used to make all those pills for?”

“I’m not sure humans are capable of feeling depressed anymore. I think that the serotonin levels have mostly been leveled out through the gene pool, and the people that can’t level out are deemed Unnecessary.”

They rode on the plane that would never be able to take Caesar to The Genesis’ home. Caesar sat in a leather chair, one that had cracks and holes in it, unable to withstand the years of use that The Named had put it through. Maybe when he got to Vegas he would repair it, fix it up so that it looked nice. He would have a lot of time to do a lot of things, he realized now. His body wasn’t going to break down anytime soon, and outside of loving Paige, what else did he have to do? So making sure that he rode in a comfortable plane seemed like a good idea.

“I just can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s over.”

Grace didn’t say anything back and he didn’t really expect her to. The whole plane ride had been in silence besides this single moment. He didn’t care what she said, really, because there wasn’t any other word for what he felt. A depression that seemed to sink a bit deeper into him every hour, a depression slowly coming to show him that he had nothing left to live for. Paige? Was that enough? Was going back to this new town and trying to create a life there—until The Genesis showed up with more fire that rained from the sky—what he wanted to do? He cared for her, loved her even, but that wasn’t what this had been about. This had been about him shutting down The Genesis or being killed by it. Jerry said it wasn’t over until one of them died, and that hadn’t happened yet.

His father told him to break everything, and now he was heading back to another compound to figure out how to grow crops in the desert. To herd sheep or some such shit.

“You’re going to give up then?” Grace asked.

It took him a few seconds to respond, but he finally said, “What choice do I have?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you don’t have one. Or maybe you try to swim to that island. You’re depressed because you want to be. Not because of what you heard inside that world. You’re depressed because you’re hopeless, not because reality has changed any.”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s different between right now and before you went into that digital space?”

“What I know,” Caesar answered.

“And that’s it. Reality hasn’t changed. The Genesis still lived there the entire time you were plotting and acting and killing. So this depression, or self-pity—I don’t really know which—is because of your mindset. Reality is the same. You say you can’t get there and that this whole dream you had, stupid from the get-go, is over. So you wallow around in this depression, probably thinking about suicide. That’s your go to, isn’t it, Caesar? Just end everything when things get tough?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“I mean, it is, isn’t it? When I turned in my little girl forever ago, I didn’t think about self-destruction. I simply prepared for the next time it may happen. When you began talking crazy, I didn’t just delete myself because I knew how it would end, I tried to stop you. When you’ve been determined to go down this path, which will most certainly lead to your own destruction, I haven’t thrown myself on a funeral pyre. I go on regardless of what happens.”

“What do you care, Grace? You think the whole thing is foolish, so why have this little fucking pick me up?”

“Because there’s too much quit in you. There’s too much sadness. You can’t go after The Genesis, fine. It’s probably for the best. But there’s a lot more to do here. There’s a whole group of people who need hope. There’s a woman who loves you. There’s Leon who has no one. There’s me who has served you your whole life. And what if you can go? What if you say I’m not stopping, no matter what, instead of flying around in this goddamn plane talking about depression? I’m just tired of hearing it, I suppose.”

Caesar looked in her direction, seeing only the wall.

His eyes were wide, and his mouth open, like someone might have just shoved a sharp object into his back—pain sprouting everywhere but Caesar unable to say anything.

It wasn’t a sharp object Caesar felt, though, it was Jerry screaming.

Chapter Thirty

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

I’d never seen anything like Las Vegas before. I think it was made all the sweeter by the fact that we just walked through hell. The unforgiving sun always shining from above. Clouds weren’t allowed to live in the desert. I understood that conceptually before that walk, but after it, I realized there must have been laws against clouds coming anywhere near the desert.

When we arrived in Vegas, I thought that I might have found a place to finally settle down. No more sleeping on rock floors. No more using candlelight when you want to move during the night. Here we could funnel the electricity to rooms. Here we could live at least somewhat like I had in the cities, before all this happened.

We lost five people on the trip, and when we arrived, the entire group collapsed inside one of the lobbies of those old casinos. There were some chairs still there, though they were breaking apart. People wouldn’t have cared if they collapsed right under their weight though, such was their exhaustion. I didn’t bother with any furniture; I took my shirt off and laid right on the tiled floor, letting my hot skin soak up the sweet coldness below it.

Jerry said nothing. He lay down next to me, his shirt off too, and closed his eyes.

We woke up sometime in the afternoon the next day, the heat inside the lobby growing as the sun marched across the sky. I was used to the soreness that came with waking; it was constant ever since we began this journey, and today would be no different. We started looking around, the whole group, searching for anything that might be useful, for anything that might give us a clue as to where to start with this place.

There was hope, I think, in all of us. Everyone except for Jerry. He was quiet, calm, too, but the rest of us were just so happy to be somewhere other than that endless oven. We thought that this place could be a home, that we could build off the structures still standing. Even Paige’s spirits picked up, though I know Caesar consumed almost all of her thoughts. Where he was, what he was doing. Jerry said nothing about him, and when I asked, it was the usual cold stare. By that point, Jerry liked me, but that didn’t mean he was going to treat me any differently. Whatever Jerry was, he was consistent.

We found the water pipes and the electrical generators throughout the city. People began working almost immediately, trying to fix the pieces that had long ago fallen apart and trying to build new, improved parts. I didn’t understand a bit of it, but I did my piece, carrying what they needed, fixing food, and anything else that would help them keep going.

We moved into the suites across the city, top floor rooms that had once been used for big spenders. Jerry, Paige, and I all stayed in a row of three rooms. Others chose to stay elsewhere, and I suppose it was an omen that none chose the other suites right next to us. Maybe it was their unconscious decision to be done with Jerry and those that followed him blindly.

I wanted that place to be my home; I hope you understand that. I wanted to start again, for the first time since my wife died and I left the city, I felt that I had a place. That walk across the desert, that earned me a place here—one that no one could deny. So whatever it took, I was willing to do it.

Hope. That’s what I had. Hope that when Caesar returned, we might actually have some kind of life. Hope that the rest of the people here could mourn and realize that life went on. Hope that we would be happy.

Hope. A beautiful thing, but ephemeral. Hope is something with potential, but something never actualized.

Chapter Thirty-One

The dead child lay in the discarded bag. Manny placed it down when he entered the room, knowing that when he finished here, he would give his son a proper burial. First though, he needed to address things in this room.

He opened the door slowly when he walked in, taking the bag off and then standing there, listening.

Jerry slept, Manny knew that, but not often and not deeply. He might already be awake, the sound of the door opening alerting him to Manny’s presence. Manny hoped that wasn’t the case, but even if it was, it wouldn’t be a problem. Manny was what Caesar had become and also what he could never be. Manny was the one that should have taken down The Genesis—he realized that now, clearly—but he would settle for taking down the old cyborg who killed his family.

He felt the punch coming from his right, darkness shrouding everything. Manny moved sharply back, and Jerry’s fist caught only air. Manny shot forward, not caring about the darkness, not caring about how quietly and quickly Jerry had arrived at the door, only wanting to get his hands on the man, to keep him from swinging again, to keep him from doing anything ever again.

Manny caught the back of Jerry’s hand as he swung through and forced it down. Manny’s right hand moved fast, faster than he knew it could, the computer in his brain reacting rather than Manny’s own mind. He grabbed Jerry’s neck and started pushing, the old man’s right hand pinned down against his leg and his throat enveloped in Manny’s grip.

He slammed Jerry into the wall, plaster and sheet rock exploding around them, creating a dust that Manny could smell but not see in the darkness. Manny took his hand away from Jerry’s neck and started swinging, over and over, smashing into Jerry’s face. The old man tried to push back, tried to throw himself from the hole that Manny created, but he couldn’t. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to do but feel Manny’s fist destroy his face.

And Manny didn’t stop hitting. He felt wires poking his skin—wires from Jerry’s face, that lined his flesh to keep it alive—and bringing blood to his knuckles. Still he punched.

When the old man’s body started sagging underneath Manny’s grip, he pulled Jerry from the hole in the wall and lifted him so they were at eye level.

He reached back and swung one last time.

Jerry’s head ripped off his body, the wires that made up his spine sparked in the darkness, revealing a bit of blood that leaked from what little veins remained inside him.

Jerry stood for a few seconds—his head still connected to his body by a few wires refusing to let go, but draped across his back. He stood, unwavering, but not moving either, and then he collapsed.

Manny stood in the dark over the broken body, a smile wide and true across his face.

*

Paige heard the noises and felt her own room shaking, knowing that it all came from Jerry’s room, which was right next to hers.

Paige heard her door open and close softly; she stepped out of bed and moved deep into a corner, hoping the darkness would shroud her from whoever had entered. The banging in Jerry’s room had stopped, and now silence draped the hotel. Silence besides someone entering her room.

Footsteps moved quickly, but clearly trying to balance speed with stealth. Paige didn’t move from the corner. She knew who it was, knew who had come for them, knew who had gone to Jerry’s room first and was now in hers. Manny. There was no one else. The Genesis wouldn’t show up and cause noises like that; no, The Genesis would send something to kill everyone in a single sweep. What went on in Jerry’s room was raw strength, and if Jerry had been right, if Manny was now like Caesar—Jerry didn’t stand a chance.

She heard the person stop in the doorway to her room.

“Paige,” Leon whispered.

She felt her legs almost give out. Her knees weakened and she reached for the dresser to keep from falling.

“Leon?” She whispered back, barely able to get the word out.

“You heard that?” He said, moving into the room, over to her voice.

“Yes.”

“What do we do?”

Run. That’s all they could do. If they stayed here and tried to fight Manny, they would die as soon as they looked at him. Silence came from the other room, and that meant only one of the two people still stood, but if it was Jerry, why hadn’t he come to them? Why was it still so quiet? Because Jerry wasn’t standing. Because Manny was left in that room and neither of them could do anything to help Jerry.

“We’ve got to get out,” she said. “We’ve got to get everyone out.”

“How? There’s no one else on this floor but us.”

They didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time to plan. If Manny wasn’t moving yet, he would be soon, and he’d start checking the rooms surrounding Jerry’s.

“Come on, we have to leave,” she said, stepping out from the shadows.

“Paaaiiiggeeee…that you?” The voice sang from the front of the room, from the doorway. It was Manny’s voice, and yet different. It was also a lunatic’s voice. A voice sounding like this was a game of hide and seek, a game where the end resulted in someone dead instead of tagged.

“Paige, where are you, dearest? We need to talk,” Manny said, sounding like he was just inside the living room. “Just for a second, I promise I don’t have that much to say.”

Paige looked at Leon, close enough so that they could see each other. There wasn’t any fear on his face; his jaw was set and he looked her directly in the eye. “Go,” he said.

*

Leon turned around from Paige and looked toward the bedroom door. He should have killed the fucker when he had the chance. He should have walked in that room and slit his throat while he lay sleeping next to his wife and child. But all of that was in the past. Too late to do any of it.

How many hours had Leon spent thinking about his guilt, that he killed Caesars family when he told April? Too many. He walked across that desert, one foot in front of the other, wondering what life would be like for Caesar had Leon kept his fucking mouth shut. He couldn’t go back to that either, though. It was too late. That’s what he realized walking across the desert—there’s no going back. So here he was, standing in this dark room with his best friend’s lover, and a murderer twenty feet away.

He wouldn’t ever have to question what he did here.

Go, he told her before turning around. He would bring Manny to the bedroom door and Paige could slip through the bathroom to the hallway and then out the front door. She would escape and maybe if Leon was lucky, he’d have a chance to kill Manny. He didn’t know what the chip did to him, not really, and he didn’t care either. He just needed to give Paige a chance, that was all. Then, Manny could do what he wanted. Caesar would know though, if she made it, what Leon had done. He would understand why. That’s what mattered.

Leon walked toward the door.

“That you, Manny? You goddamn prick!” He shouted, his voice cracking through the silence.

“Ohhhh, it’s the lackey,” Manny said back, moving further into the living room, closer to the door. “I was looking for Paige. Have you seen her?”

Keep coming. Keep coming.

“Sure haven’t.” Leon stepped closer, not quite leaving the room, wanting Manny to have to step inside, to have no view of the front door.

“I think you’re llyyyyyinng,” Manny said, his voice nearly sounding like a song—a sick song, a nursery rhyme for dead children. He was moving closer though, coming toward Leon’s own voice.

The moonlight bled through the living room window and Leon watched as the man stepped through the door, coming to grab him. It was Manny, but also a man who looked bigger. A man whose grin said he never knew sadness because those white teeth shining out at the world were a talisman against it. A man whose eyes glinted in the moonlight, looking both black and radiant, as if some invisible energy ran through him, energy that came from wild, uncontrolled lightning. Whatever was inside this man might have memories of Manny, but it was no longer him—not even the prick that Leon had grown to hate. This person was so much worse.

“Why don’t you come and find out?” Leon asked, his voice boisterous. He looked over his left shoulder and saw that Paige was gone, inside the bathroom, maybe already in the hall, maybe outside of the room and running. Running. That’s what he wanted her to do, to just get away from this place.

“Oh, I know you’re lying. But we’ll find out together.”

Manny stood five feet away, and Leon tried to open his mouth, to say another smart-ass comment, but couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything at all, besides stand there and look, because steel chords ran through his entire body, locking him in place.

“Paige?” Leon asked, his voice sounding weak, wounded, and completely outside of his control.

*

Paige was five floors down and two away from the lobby when she heard the door open above her.

“Paige!” Leon shouted down the stairwell, his voice echoing off the walls, shooting both up and down at the same time.

It was him though, no doubt about it. Not Manny, not Jerry, not anyone else in The Named. His voice, up where she just came from, in the hallway where she had left him and Jerry, running for her own life.

“Paige, are you in here?” He sounded scared but alive. Paige stopped her descent, where she had been taking stairs three at a time, sometimes leaping half staircases at once. She didn’t say anything, but stood there, looking up instead of down, wondering what to do.

“Paige, if you’re there, he collapsed. He just dropped. He’s still lying in the room. I’m going to wake everyone up and meet outside, if you hear me. Meet me outside!”

She waited another second, not breathing, completely unsure—but her feelings for Leon won out.

“I’m down here!” She shouted up the stairs.

“Oh, thank God,” Leon said and she heard him begin walking down.

She started up the stairs too, moving toward him, wanting to find him and then leave, to get everyone outside where they could figure out what to do. If Manny had collapsed, what did it mean? Why? And Jerry? How was he? The questions swarmed through her head, blocking out even the stairs that she walked up, her mind switching from the frantic need to escape and find safety, to planning how all of them would survive this.

She found herself standing in front of Leon, her thoughts quieting.

“He’s in the room?”

“Not quite,” Leon said, donning a smile that she had never seen on his face before. “I brought him with me.”

Paige saw the fist coming at her, but she didn’t have a chance to stop it.

*

Paige opened her left eye. She blinked a few times, wondering why she couldn’t open her right eye as well, why she couldn’t see out of it. She reached up to rub it, to see if crusted blood had somehow closed it shut.

Except her arm didn’t move. Not a single inch.

She tried again, with her other arm, but it didn’t budge either. She tried to turn her face down, and then real panic came over her, because she couldn’t move her neck either—she couldn’t look down at her arms.

She tried to do everything at once, tried to talk but wasn’t able to, tried to stand but wasn’t able to—her mind revving up and fear completely taking over. She looked out before her, but she wasn’t in any of the hotel rooms. She sat in the middle of the street, the moon shining down from the sky, with broken buildings surrounding her on all sides. A fire stood in front of her, a fire built out of shattered furniture, and she could see Leon to her right—but he wasn’t moving either. He stared straight ahead, his arms at his side just like hers.

He hit her, that’s why she couldn’t open her eye. He hit her and now it was swollen shut and they were both sitting out here staring straight ahead like drugged up medical patients. What was happening? Manny, he had collapsed—that’s what Leon said before he knocked her out.

But there weren’t any answers in the space in front of her. She couldn’t even move her eyes to the left or right, they were frozen in place. Only her eyelids were allowed movement, a blink when her eyes became too dry.

“You’re awake.”

She watched as legs appeared in front of her. Dirty jeans worn far too long, jeans that had traveled across the desert. She couldn’t look up to see who it was, but then she really didn’t need to, because the voice told her everything. Manny, not collapsed, not lying in some hotel room, but out here in the middle of the Las Vegas street with a fire burning to give them light.

People had to see the fire from inside their rooms, but what would they do? Would they walk out here and meet Manny, meet his crazy smile and his body that looked to have grown in size. The Genesis had to thread him with extra metal, extra strength, because he was at least fifty pounds heavier, and carried none of it around his midsection.

Manny squatted, his knees bending and his face leveling with Paige’s own. This was the first time she had seen him. This man she had spent years and years with, planning and learning. Growing as individuals. And there wasn’t anything left inside him. His smile glowed as bright as the fire, but more dangerous. It wouldn’t leave his mouth, she felt sure of it, that even when he slept the smile lived there like worms in dirt.

“Sorry I had to use your friend,” Manny said. “I didn’t want to do a whole lot of running after the hike I took to get here. I’m sure you can understand, given you trod the exact same path, right?”

Paige felt her mouth loosen up, felt the muscles around her jaw relax and her tongue finally move a bit. She could talk.

“Where’s Jerry?” She asked.

“Oh, I almost forgot about him!” Manny shouted, joyed beyond measure, his voice reaching up into the sky. He hopped up and walked past the fire; Paige couldn’t move to see further, but watched as his back faded away, moving out into the night. He stopped, bent over, his hulking back cutting through the night like a massive machine. He stood up and started walking back to the little camp he had set up. He dragged something in his right hand and carried something else in his left, although Paige couldn’t tell what either object was. It didn’t matter, because whatever he brought with him, it wasn’t good. It was all bad, everything around this camp, from her and her closed eye to Leon still staring straight forward, obviously unable to move; it was all bad.

But what he carried finally came into her vision, and she wished she hadn’t asked about Jerry.

His right hand held Jerry’s head, four feet off the ground, but still connected to his body somehow. Tears broke out from Paige’s eyes onto her face, whatever force held her still hadn’t stopped her ability to cry. It was awful, what she saw, the wires stretching out from his neck, even ripping through the skin and down to his shoulders, like someone stripping a house of its copper. Jerry, in all his wisdom, his leadership, his vision, being dragged across the pavement in such a manner.

Manny dropped the body next to the fire, and it fell right in front of her vision. She couldn’t stop staring though she desperately wanted to, wanted to look anywhere but at him, anywhere but at the person who taught her for the past two decades.

Manny walked to her side, so that she could see his knees but still see Jerry.

“There he is. I think he’s still alive, to be honest, though I’m not sure how. Of course his communication skills aren’t what they used to be, but we can’t blame him too much for that—would yours be up to par if your head was almost ripped off?”

The tears rolled down Paige’s cheeks and a cry escaped her mouth.

Manny stepped in front of her and knelt down, where Paige looked upon something at least as ghastly as her mentor lying ripped apart on the street. A child, a baby, in Manny’s arms. Its skin a pallid green, and a smell wafting off it that made her stomach turn immediately. A dead child, whose skin was blistered across his forehead, bubbles made of green skin poking out from the child’s face. The smell, the goddamn smell, how was Manny able to stand it? She felt her stomach lurching, the hold on her body not stopping it, and then food and stomach acid sprang from her mouth, dripping down her chin and onto her clothes—unable to project forward because she couldn’t move.

“My new son,” Manny said, positioning the child so that he could look at him. The baby’s head lolled to the side, not a single muscle inside holding it up. “He had a rough go of it crossing the desert, but that’s okay. I’ll bury him here in a little bit and find a new one. That’s the good thing about now; Dustin keeps coming back. Soon, I think, Brandi will too. Just really a blessing, you know?”

Paige spit the best she could, trying to throw the vomit out of her mouth.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” She said, her voice hoarse.

“Me? Nothing at all; I’m as happy as can be,” he said. “I’ve learned to love a new son and will learn to love another one very soon. Jerry is in his rightful spot, and Caesar will be soon. What could possibly be wrong?”

Paige let out a sound, pain and anger mixed with a whimper.

Manny reached up with his right hand and rubbed the side of Paige’s face, gently, like Caesar would in bed.

“What’s going to hurt Caesar most, do you think, Paige?”

She felt the finger slide across her cheekbone.

“Hurting you or fucking you? Or both?”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Theo understood fairly quickly what he had done. He spent two days sitting in front of his apartment complex, handing out pill after pill, a line running down the street and around multiple blocks. Everyone wanted what he was giving away. An anti-virus? Yes, please. Inject me immediately. Theo was shocked, at first, how easily people took to it. How the patch on his chest and the message from The Genesis had people believing whatever he wanted them to. They didn’t even ask questions. They just stood there and took the pill, most of the time right in front of him, not wanting to wait until they were out of sight. The quicker they had the anti-virus inside their body, the better.

Two days and he was finally out of pills, but by then, he thought he knew what he’d done.

He might have fed the entirety of his apartment building. Certainly a large percentage. There were others, of course, who came from around the city, but Theo fed a lot of the people he lived next to.

And that was a mistake. Not one that he could avoid, because Mock made the rules, but a mistake nonethe-less. Because now he lived next to these people who took the ‘anti-virus’. There was no ‘anti-virus’; if Theo hadn’t known that to begin with, he did now. Virus might have been the correct word. Virus might have been exactly what these people were putting inside themselves; how else did what happened next make any sense?

Mock made it clear that Theo didn’t have a job anymore besides what Mock told him. So the day after the pills ran out and Mock hadn’t contacted him, Theo was left with nothing to do. So he went down to the lobby, not wearing the uniform from yesterday, and not understanding that people had seen his face with such clarity the day before. The first representative of The Genesis in a thousand years, and he lived right next to them, so of course they noticed. It was stupid, on his part, to think that—to believe what happened yesterday wasn’t going to directly affect him for the rest of his life.

“Do you have any more?” A woman asked him as he walked through the lobby.

“Excuse me?” Theo said, stopping, seeing the woman for the first time. He couldn’t have recognized a single person from the hours of lines he slogged through during the past two days, so if this woman had been in it, he didn’t know.

“More of the anti-virus? My son, he wasn’t in line yesterday, but he needs some. Do you have it?”

“No, I’m sorry.” Theo tried to walk around her, not sure where he was going but knowing that he didn’t want to stand in front of this woman anymore. He didn’t like the look on her face, the set of her jaw, the sternness across her brow. He hadn’t seen that look before, not on anyone.

“What do you mean, no?” She asked, taking a step back and in front of him again, stopping him from leaving.

“That was the last of the supplies. I’m sure The Genesis is creating more.”

“Last of the supplies?” The woman said, her eyebrows raising, but more a challenge than a question. “Bullshit.”

She said it low and hard, so that no one else could hear besides Theo. She wanted him to understand that she wanted one of those pills and knew he had more. Understand that she knew he was lying to her.

“I’m sorry?” He said, his eyes darting around the room, trying to see if anyone else was looking at him.

And they were. Everyone. The entire lobby was staring, so even though the woman tried to be quiet, they all heard her because they weren’t paying attention to anything else.

“Give me a pill. For my son. Now,” the woman said, her voice rising, either forgetting or not caring about the other people in this room.

“I…”

Someone else took a step closer to the two of them. “If she gets another pill, I want one too.”

They all came then, everyone moving closer, trying to get closer to Theo. He took a step back, frantically searching for a way out of this gathering crowd. He wouldn’t be able to push forward, wouldn’t be able to get out of the lobby, not unless he broke out in a sheer run but that might incite these people. Because they wanted what he didn’t have.

“If her son gets one, so does my daughter,” someone shouted from across the lobby.

Theo took another step back. Could he make it to his apartment? Would they follow him there? If they did, what would he do? Even the desk clerk was looking at him, not in wonder or fear, but anger, wanting what the rest of these people wanted.

“Theo! How are ya? Want to come in here for a second?”

Theo flashed around to the voice behind him. He never thought he would be so happy to see that machine, to see Mock standing in an office at the back of the lobby, beckoning for Theo to join it.

He didn’t wait, didn’t walk, didn’t try to hold onto some semblance of control. He ran, as fast as he could, afraid that if he stayed around a second longer, the people in the room would rip him to shreds. Theo ran right past Mock, and listened as the door shut behind him. Not quickly, not like Theo had run, but confidently, as if nothing out there was worth Mock’s attention.

“You’re probably going to want to be more careful,” Mock said.

Theo turned around, his eyes wide, his chest heaving up and down from the sprint. “What the fuck was that?”

“That was the anti-virus at work.”

“They were going to kill me!”

Mock moved across the room. It wasn’t large, but it was comfortable, an employee lounge apparently. Mock sat down on the couch, then laid out across it, propping its feet up on the armrest. “I imagine they would have. The pill you gave them is a strong one, at least as strong as the one you fed your workers.”

“What the hell are you doing? What are you having me do?”

Mock didn’t smile though its voice sounded like it wanted to. “Well, you did a good job yesterday, I’m not going to lie about that. You gave out nearly two thousand of those pills.”

“AND WHAT DO THEY DO?” Theo shouted, losing his temper—realizing it might be a costly mistake but unable to stop it, uncaring even.

“They make humans what they were meant to be. They make you animals.”

Theo walked over to the couch that Mock lay on, standing above it. “I need to know more.”

Mock moved and Theo didn’t have time to blink. He was against the wall with Mock’s see-through hand across his throat. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything but the mechanizations moving inside Mock’s head. Those eyes that weren’t eyes, because they had no pupil, no iris, just the machine running everything beneath them. That’s what this was, a machine, and nothing else, a machine that would kill him immediately, and he had come in demanding something of this machine, acting as if he controlled this machine because of…but he couldn’t think of why he had done it, because for Theo, the room was going dark around him.

“You need what I give you and nothing else. I’ll end you right here, right now, and then toss your body out into that lobby where those animals can rip you apart for not giving them more drugs. You understand?”

Theo tried to nod, but he didn’t know how effective he was at it. He tried though, hoping that this machine would release him.

It did, and Theo collapsed to the floor, his throat flaring with pain, but desperately trying to suck air down it.

“Now, I need you to listen, Theo, and not walk around this lounge like you’re owed something. Perhaps The Genesis respects your kind, or pities you—but I don’t. I hate you. I hate all of you equally and the only reason I let you stay around a bit longer than your pals was that I hated you a bit less. Don’t start making me hate you with the rest of them, because I’ll go ahead and have you walk off a building too.” Mock laid back down on the couch, not looking at Theo collapsed on the floor across the room. “I have more for us to do. Let me know when you’re ready to hear it.”

It took a full minute before Theo had air back in his lungs. His throat was red and felt like fire grew up his trachea, but he could listen now. He could lie on this floor and listen to the goddamn devil on the couch. “I’m ready,” Theo said.

“Good. Now those people out there, they got a bit angry at you, but you’re not the only one they’re going to get mad at. Let me see how I can explain this to you. Have you ever heard of a term called road-rage?”

Theo shook his head no before realizing that Mock wasn’t looking at him, and then said softly, “No.” He’d never heard of the term and couldn’t care less about it, but if Mock was going to tell him, he better listen. He better shut up, lie on this floor and listen to whatever that thing said.

“I didn’t think you would. Back when your kind ruled this place, you traveled in cars everywhere—I’m sure you know that. Well, for some reason that I can’t begin to understand, you would fly around in these things at unsafe speeds, and then use a little contraption to speak with others while not paying attention to the road. Then, there would be accidents and other such things, and this term road-rage emerged into your vocabulary. You would become so angry at people for the way they drove that some of you would literally kill. Just get out in the middle of a road and blow someone’s head off. Crazy.”

Mock sighed, folding his hands over his chest.

“Anyway, that’s kind of what we’re doing here. We’re creating road-rage, all the time. Maybe a bit worse, but the funny thing is, not that much worse. You humans are like rats, willing to eat your own kind. The Genesis spent a long time trying to change that, but for some reason, it’s asking me to regress some of you, so that’s what I’m going to do—give you a bit of your heritage back.”

“I can’t possibly help. There’s too many people. I gave out two thousand in two days. There’s a few million people in this city.”

“You’re right there, Theo. You can’t help by doing what you did yesterday, but that’s not what I want. That was just the beginning. I’m going to need you to lead these people. I’m going to need you to lead them against each other, to make sure that as many people die as possible, all of them at the hands of their neighbors. Got it?”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Leon walked, but not of his own accord. He walked because Manny demanded it. He walked because he had no other choice; if he had a choice, he would have chosen anything other than this.

He would die soon, without a doubt, and that had to be the point of this whole exercise. To kill him in one of the most cruel ways imaginable, exposure to the sun. Leon walked back across the desert, the same one he had just finished crossing a day ago. Going back out into it, except this time, naked. This time without a single bit of clothing to cover his skin, and while he was tan, it wouldn’t stop the sun from destroying him.

There were different plans for Paige, apparently. She was wrapped in clothing and given water when Manny felt like she needed it. She drank when he wanted, walked when he wanted, everything as he wanted—just like Leon. They were both under his complete control, but Leon would die out here and Paige would make it across the desert. Leon had heard what Manny said to Paige back at the campfire, thinking that he was about to witness a rape, witness Manny throw himself on Paige, but Manny hadn’t. He had sat down and stared into the fire, just like Leon and Paige, until the sun came up. Then they started this walk without speaking. Manny had Leon strip himself down, and now at noon, Leon just wanted to collapse. He wanted to lie down on the sand and let the hot granules burn his skin, hopefully killing him soon.

He would start blistering next. He understood that. And after? He would have a heat stroke. He wouldn’t make it through one day, not like this.

Sometimes he walked in front of Manny and sometimes he walked behind him, just depending on the pace that Manny wanted to move him. Manny carried Jerry over his shoulder, his head still dangling from his neck, bouncing against Manny’s back. When Leon walked behind him, he sometimes saw Jerry’s face and other times just the back of his head. He watched Paige weep at the first sight of Jerry. Leon never wept but it saddened him, disgusted him, even. Jerry was a fucking asshole and had ruined Leon’s life, but he deserved better than this. He deserved better than for some psycho to carry him across the desert, still alive but unable to function in the slightest.

The rest of The Named were behind them and they weren’t following. They weren’t coming after Leon and Paige because they all saw what happened last night. They had to. They all saw this hulking beast throw their leader—nearly decapitated—in front of a fire, and then sit all night, daring them to come. None came. None would. The group had been cowed, been subdued to the point where they only wanted to try living again. No more fighting. No more running. No more death. So if this person they used to know, Manny, wanted to take Jerry and the two of them, so be it.

Leon wondered where they were heading, where the two of them would end up? But that was wrong, because Leon knew where he would end up. Here, in this desert, his skin a blistering and pus filled mess. Paige? Where was she going? Caesar? Was he dead too? Was that what this meant, Manny showing up? Was Caesar no longer alive to protect them?

Leon walked, his bare feet rubbing against the sand, only allowed to think, because the rest of his body was owned by someone else.

*

Jerry was a heavy son of a bitch. Manny knew that probably would be the case, given that his body was mostly machine, but he hadn’t imagined this heavy. He really wanted to drop him, to just set him down and continue on with these two, but no—this would be perfect or it wouldn’t be done at all.

Leon would end up near death when they finished this march. He would deliver Paige as close to perfect as he could. Manny wasn’t quite sure what to do with Jerry yet. He was still alive; the chip in Manny’s head registered Jerry’s own. He might have some feeling, some brain activity, but Manny didn’t know how much. He needed to figure out exactly what to do with all of them. He only knew that if he brought these three with him, Caesar would follow. Caesar would go anywhere for these three. So he was going to bring them back to civilization and then figure out the rest. Caesar would come for him and then…

Well, he knew his orders. He wasn’t supposed to touch the man. But if he showed up at Manny’s doorstep? What was he to do then? Turn the other cheek? No. No. No.

Manny smiled as the Nos ran through his head.

The Genesis could do what it wanted, but if—and when—Caesar showed up, Manny would do what he wanted.

But first he wanted to make the people Caesar cared for suffer. First these three, they were going to hurt a whole lot, and then when Caesar showed up, he would get to see the result of all his heroics. His parents? He wouldn’t even remember them when Manny finished with these three. He would only know what Manny showed him, and Manny planned on showing him pain.

Manny walked the two of them onward, carrying Jerry, and thinking about what they would all look like when Caesar arrived. None of them would look as good as they did now. Even Jerry had more waiting for him.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“They’re not there,” Caesar said, looking down from the plane to the city below him.

“You can’t know that,” Grace said.

The plane was circling overhead, automatically finding the best place to land, although regardless of which spot it picked, the landing would be rough. The streets were barely streets anymore, at a thousand years old, most of them were broken and almost completely overridden by foliage. The plane would find a spot though, and if it didn’t, Caesar had already calculated a place where he thought they could land. Twenty minutes and they would be there, but Caesar didn’t think it mattered.

A few lights burned from inside buildings, most likely small fires keeping people warm in the night air. But none of those would be Jerry.

“He’s offline.”

“And that means he’s gone? It means the other two are gone as well? No. That’s you making the worst of this situation before we’re even there.”

Caesar didn’t answer her. He didn’t need to. The three of them were gone and those fires were whoever Manny had left. That’s what he heard in his head when Jerry screamed—he heard Manny arriving. The scream degenerated into static inside Caesar’s head quickly, and then it finally went black. He couldn’t reach out at all. There was nothing to reach out to.

And that meant Jerry was dead.

It meant Manny had free reign over the entire place and who would he go for? The answer was too obvious to say aloud. So he let Grace speak while the plane circled, but soon, neither of them would have words. Neither of them would have anything but three missing people and perhaps a lot more dead on their hands.

Caesar leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

*

“You just watched them?” Caesar asked, staring at Keke and Tim. “You just fucking watched them sit out there?”

Tim didn’t look away. “That’s exactly what I did. I watched the whole night, and in the morning, when they picked up and left, I watched them leave too. Then I went outside and walked to where they sat all night.”

Caesar turned away, walking to the window in the room. He looked out at the city. It had once been beautiful, and still was in a way, but Earth had claimed it again. Sand lived as much inside the buildings as out, and the streets were little more than desert with rocks scattered around it. Jerry had brought them here in hopes of reclaiming it.

“How long were you with him, Tim?”

“How long were you?” Tim asked back.

“How fucking long?”

“Ten years. And Keke nine. And both of us walked all the way across that desert with him, hoping that it would be the last time we walked anywhere. We both gave everything for this group, and we’re willing to give our lives, but not for nothing. I’m not going to die just so Manny can carry me around headless like he is Jerry.”

There were forty-two people left. Forty-two out of a group that had been over a hundred and fifty just a few months ago. Forty-two left and his lover not one of them. His friend not one of them. His mentor, not one of them. Forty-two people, all of them geniuses, but not a bit of fight left in them. These were Jerry’s Captains, here, saying that they had watched Manny walk off into the desert with their leader.

Caesar saw people moving around outside in the heat, working on a generator they had found somewhere. They all knew Jerry was gone, knew Paige was too, but they kept working anyway. They weren’t packing up what they needed and following Manny’s steps out into the desert. They weren’t going after their friends. They were going to do the same thing Keke and Tim were up here. They were going to keep trying to live, even if that meant those they loved wouldn’t.

“So what do you plan on doing?”

“Getting this place to a degree where we can inhabit it,” Tim said.

“And when The Genesis shows up? Because it will, now that Manny knows where you are—what will you do then?”

“We’ll figure that out when the time comes,” Keke said.

The three of them stood in Jerry’s room. Caesar had looked at the hole in the wall briefly, and then turned away, not wanting to imagine what Jerry had gone through. The hole was massive, like a train made it instead of a human.

“All of these people are going to die if you sit here and do nothing. You have to see that.”

“All of these people are going to die if I take them out there after Manny,” Tim said.

Caesar didn’t know what to do yet. He landed a few hours ago and was just now understanding the extent to which these people wanted to do nothing. Wanted to live and be left alone. A year ago, these people would have laid their lives down for Jerry. A few months ago, they would have listened to anything Caesar told them, and now, they wouldn’t hear a single word from him. They weren’t leaving this place for anything in the world. The people downstairs working hadn’t even looked Caesar in the eye when he passed. Shamed or indifferent, he didn’t know which, but the result was the same—he was a ghost walking among them. He could have just as easily been taken by Manny himself.

Caesar turned from the window and looked at Tim and Keke. Neither dropped their eyes and Caesar imagined the conversation they had before he showed up. Imagined them rationalizing their decision. Imagined them discussing how they would defend themselves against the accusations that were sure to come. And now, they didn’t look away from him. If anything, they accused him.

“Alright, then,” Caesar said. He walked by them out into the darkened hallway, where the sunlight from the windows couldn’t reach.

“Where are you…” But Caesar didn’t hear the rest of Tim’s question. He moved quickly, although not completely sure where he was heading. He had no plan, had no idea of what he should do. He could go out into the desert after Manny, but if he lost out there, it was over and his friends died too.

How do you know they’re not dead already? Another question he couldn’t answer. If he went out there in that desert, and the three of them weren’t with Manny, if they were dead, then he was wasting his goddamn time. He was risking his life for people that were already dead, and that meant he was sacrificing his chance at The Genesis.

“Where are we going?” Grace asked.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t take it in there anymore,” Caesar said aloud.

“What options do we have?”

He didn’t know, that was the goddamn problem. Everything available to him had a serious downside, and the fact that he couldn’t rally a single person behind him wasn’t helping either.

“We go after them, I guess,” he said.

“How? The plane won’t land out there on that sand.”

“By foot, then.”

*

Theo stood in front of the group wearing his black uniform, the red peace sign on his chest looking more threatening than anything he had ever seen before. The sign, Mock told him, had been used to symbolize the end of war. That’s why The Genesis adopted it in the beginning, to symbolize that there would be no need for violence any longer. Theo understood the irony of such a symbol, especially the way it was used early on in The Genesis’ life, during The Purge. Maybe violence had ended for a time, but that time was over now. The symbol on his chest might say that peace was near, but Theo knew peace had never been further away.

A group of three thousand people stood in front of him, stretching from his podium to the doors a hundred yards back, filling the upper balconies.

They followed him in here because he wore the suit. No other reason. But he thought this was smart, the way Mock was setting it all up. Theo would deliver the message, not Mock. Not an application. Not a machine. A human would tell them the danger that awaited all of them. A human would deliver their new purpose, protection of the human race.

These people would never see Mock. They would never know the true mastermind behind all of this. They saw only Theo, standing in this uniform with the red patch on it. And he would stand up here and tell them Mock’s plan. He would incite the panic. He would start the murder…because, at this point, what choice did he have? He could say no and end up dead within a few seconds of the word leaving his mouth. He thought about doing that, briefly, during his conversation with Mock. About just telling the transparent machine to fuck off, but all he had to do was think about the way that thing’s grip had felt on his throat and he quickly realized it wouldn’t happen. Theo didn’t think himself a coward, but he was having to readjust his expectations of himself. Maybe cowardice was made of this. An inability to take a stand. Someone that fears death more than anything else.

Theo cleared his throat, careful to stay away from the microphone. All these people were here, waiting for him to speak.

“You’re going to tell them that The Named has infiltrated the entire city. You’re going to tell them that the anti-virus they took is created to specifically identify The Named, and that when they find themselves growing angry at someone, it means they’ve successfully identified a member of the group.”

Theo had stared at Mock when it said that, stared with his mouth slightly open, almost unable to believe what he was hearing. Mock had created a pill which mandated that people become angry, and now he was going to set them against everyone they came in contact with.

“That’s not all we’re doing here, though, Theo. Two thousand people is a good number, but we’re going to need to increase that. We’re going to need to bring it to other cities as well. That’s what I’m beginning to think of you as, my Emissary of the anti-virus. You’re going to spread it for me, to as many people as you possibly can,” Mock had said.

“How?” Theo whispered, finally understanding the depth of this. Finally understanding that perhaps sacrificing those people in that building hadn’t been worth what came next. Because this didn’t end. He had thought, at least part of him did, that it wouldn’t get worse. That he might have to keep working for Mock, but that the worst was over when that building collapsed.

That wasn’t the case.

Theo didn’t understand the meaning of worse. Not yet, anyway.

He stepped up to the microphone.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, his voice booming out across the building—which was considered a historic treasure, a building that had been used for a very different, yet similar purpose when humanity ruled. It was a church, perhaps the only building in the entire city that didn’t brush up against the clouds. People had come to this place a thousand years ago to be lied to, although the lies didn’t result in as many deaths as the one that Theo was about to tell. The lies back then talked about eternal life. Theo’s lies today would lead to certain and immediate death.

The room hushed beneath his words.

“My name is Theodore Yellen, and I’m The Genesis’ Representative. I’ve invited you all here today…” Theo looked down at his palm, hidden behind the podium. He held a pill, one of the tiny white ones that he had passed out to so many people already.

“You can take it if you want,” Mock had said. “It might make things a bit easier for you, because I can tell this isn’t exactly your dream job.”

He pocketed the pill when Mock handed it to him and hadn’t looked at it since. He thought taking it would be insanity, that swallowing this thing would make him the same as the group of people that nearly attacked him.

So why are you looking at it now? Because it might make things a bit easier. That’s why. And things were going to get a lot harder, he imagined. Because he wasn’t being asked to simply set these people loose, he would need to direct them. That was clear.

“If you let them go on their own, it will be simple mayhem. We need controlled mayhem,” Mock said.

But Theo had none of the anger in him needed for this. He didn’t hold the madness that the crowd before him was capable of producing. To him, he was following orders out of fear, not out of anger. Would these people see through him because of it? Would they follow him or rip him to shreds?

He wouldn’t take the pill yet. Maybe one day, but not yet. He stuck it back in his pocket.

“I’ve invited you all here because there’s a threat facing us now, a grave one, that The Genesis has identified and needs our help—your help—to combat…”

Chapter Thirty-Five

“What if he’s in the middle of doing something you don’t want to know about?” Grace asked.

It was possible. Maybe even probable. Caesar didn’t know what Manny would be up to when Caesar made contact. He only knew what Manny had done to Jerry, nearly ripped his head clean off his torso, and there was very little reason to think that he wouldn’t do the same or worse to Paige and Leon.

What other option do I have? Caesar asked.

They both were outside; Caesar stood under the shade of a crumbling awning. He could see The Named working in the distance. They could probably see him too, though none of them turned around to look.

“I don’t know,” Grace answered. “I don’t know if there are any options. You just need to understand that when you connect, you’re going to get whatever is going through his head, and if he’s in some horrible act, you’re going to see it.”

I have to do something, he said. He’d spent the last few hours thinking, running calculations and probabilities through his head, trying to see this from every possible angle. Every minute he waited here, Manny’s group moved forward—if there was a group any longer. He didn’t know if Manny had transportation, didn’t know what Manny was capable of, really. All the angles, all the probabilities, didn’t mean anything though, because they were based on assumptions that Caesar couldn’t back up. He ran it all by Grace and what she said summed up everything: I don’t know.

It’s either I contact him or I just start following. I just go into the desert and hope he hasn’t killed them.

Grace said nothing and Caesar peered out at the group hammering away at the metal contraption. He could probably walk over and fix it in an hour, but fuck them. He had no interest in helping that group, no interest in helping Tim and Keke. No interest in anyone in Vegas. The city could remain dead forever.

Caesar reached out with his mind, searching for a signal that might identify itself as something similar to him. He knew Jerry’s signal well, could find it from across the world, but he wasn’t sure if Jerry had a signal anymore, so he was looking for something different. Something alien to him, but at the same time, similar to what was inside his own mind.

He spread out across the desert, the chip looking over every dune and up into the clouds, finding anything to communicate with, man or machine.

It took him ten minutes, standing there, watching the horizon but taking none of it in. He found Manny, though, found the signal.

Manny, he said.

Thefuckisthisgetthefuckouttamyheaddonteventhinkaboutdoingitagain.

The flood of thoughts rushed over Caesar like a river flooding its bank. Before, he had seen mania in Manny’s thoughts, but not this uncontrolled fear. Uncontrolled rage.

Caesar said nothing for a few seconds, letting the continued train of thoughts rush through him. When they finally silenced, as if Manny’s mind had simply run out of things to say, Caesar waited another thirty seconds before speaking. The silence in between wasn’t someone plotting or planning, it was the silence of a child who has cried for hours and no one has heard him, the silence of a man who has argued his last point, and can think of nothing else to say.

Manny, where are you?

The silence dragged on, making Caesar wonder if Manny had shut the connection off.

Sorry about that, Manny said finally. Just a reaction after the last time you were in my head. I’m sure you can imagine.

Where are you?

I’m almost home, Manny answered. Do you know where home is now for me? Allencine. It’s not a bad place at all, really. I’m thinking about even moving into your parents’ old apartment. I think that would be fitting, wouldn’t it?

Caesar heard everything Manny said, but after Allencine, nothing mattered. Was it possible, for him to be there already? Not without help. He couldn’t have made that walk alone, not in this short time. He had to have some kind of transportation, especially carrying Jerry.

You’re not there, Manny. There hasn’t been enough time.

Why don’t you come and find out then, if you think I’m lying?

Have you hurt them? Caesar asked.

Well, Jerry has seen better days, for sure. Leon isn’t feeling his best either, but so far, Paige is looking good. If you come to me, though, you’ll be able to see everything in glorious detail.

I’ll come, Caesar said without thinking about what it meant. He would go, to Allencine, or to another city, wherever Manny directed him if it meant he had a chance at getting them back.

I figured you would. All I needed to do was grab these three people and the rest would take care of itself. When do you think you’ll arrive?

Three days. Don’t hurt them, Manny. Remember who they used to be. Remember how you used to care about them.

Shut up with that bullshit, Manny snapped back. They’re going to get what they deserve the same as you. I’ll see you in three days, Caesar. If you try to get in my head again, Leon is losing a body part.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Life of Caesar Wells

by Leon Bastille

I remember coming home to find my wife lying with her head massacred. Holes throughout her cranium and blood splattered to space and back. I thought I understood what she had gone through, or at least understood that it had been bad. Very bad. Manny taught me that I didn’t know anything about what she went through. Manny taught me that Jerry, in doing what he did to my wife, was crueler than I ever imagined.

Manny taught me pain and he gave me a glimpse of what my wife went through. Now, looking back at it all, it breeds a certain hatred for Jerry that I hadn’t felt before. With hindsight, it gives me perspective for how much April suffered, and makes me wonder whether she actually deserved it. Even now, Jerry would say of course she did, given that Caesar was nearly liquidated. He would say she deserved worse, an eternity of what happened to her, of knives plunging into her skull. I don’t know anymore, and the fact that Jerry still believes it, given what we both went through, makes me understand a lot about the man. There’s a history behind him that I may never know, but it bred a creature that I barely believe is human.

Manny dispatched the people living in Caesar’s old apartment with a speed that bordered on recklessness. I realize The Genesis probably backed him in anything he did, that it would clean up whatever mess he happened to make, but still…

We entered the apartment after nightfall, though the couple wasn’t asleep yet. Both their eyes fell on Manny at almost the same time. Of course, I wasn’t able to move, but I watched. I saw the moment that Manny took over. Their eyes had been searching, wondering who was in here and why. The next, all the wonder, the casual flicks of their eyes as they looked at the four of us, stopped. The people stared straight ahead, just as Paige and I did.

Both turned to the glass windows lining the apartment, looking like robots, not like humans at all. I wondered—briefly—if that’s what I looked like to them. If I looked like some machine. I only wondered it for a second though, because both started running full speed at the glass windows. I didn’t cry out. I couldn’t. I just watched as they hit head first, at practically the exact same time, and then they were flying, their hands out to their sides. I suppose Manny gave up control because they both started screaming then, screaming and falling, looking at the clouds below them and knowing that nothing in those white pillows would stop their descent.

The wind ripped in from the broken windows immediately, sweeping over us like a paintbrush made of ice.

I could only watch, knowing that those people would hit the ground soon, possibly killing others, and hopefully alerting someone to come up here and look. To see what happened. No one would come though; my hope was less than futile. No one was coming to stop Manny. Not Caesar and not The Genesis. He was free to terrorize whoever he wanted, to kill as he pleased, to take and take and take.

Manny dropped Jerry to the floor as the door closed behind us. I felt myself walking to the living room, sitting down on the couch as the wind continued ripping around us. Paige stood at the door, not being willed to move yet.

He walked over to me and looked down, glee dancing in his eyes like sparks from a firework.

“I could wait on this, I suppose,” Manny said.

I felt my jaw loosen, the first time in days, as he gave me the ability to speak. Though I could talk, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to say a thing to this person in front of me; I didn’t want to beg, didn’t want to reason. I couldn’t move my eyes to look at Paige—I could only look at that freak. My skin was blistered, but my brain still worked, because eventually Manny had put clothes over me and given me water. He wasn’t wanting to kill me, not out there, only prepping me for what was to come. The pain from sitting on the couch was bad, but I wasn’t going to cry out, not for him.

I spit as hard as I could, the saliva smacking into his face. It stuck for a second, and then gravity got a hold of it, causing it to drip down his cheek.

The happiness in his eyes died, leaving a hard rock where it had once been. He reached up with his hand and wiped away my spit, then squatted down so that our eyes were level with each other.

“I could wait. I think I might enjoy it a little more if I did. Kind of like foreplay before sex.” He glanced behind him to Paige. “You could watch what happens to her. You think you would like that?”

“Fuck you.”

He nodded, his eyes softening. “I’ll start here then. Let’s see how far we get.”

My right hand moved over to my left arm.

I used to keep my nails clean. I used to keep them short. It’d been a while since I had the opportunity to do that.

My hand started scratching, hard and fast, over and over, digging into its brother’s flesh. It took a few minutes of that fanatic rubbing to draw blood. But once it came, it flowed like water from the rock Moses struck. I realized why Manny gave me control over my mouth again. He wanted to hear me scream. I managed to hold it back for a while, but when I touched bone, the wind carried my cries outside, where they fell to the ground like that couple had minutes before.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Keke looked back at Las Vegas. Turned completely around and faced it full. The path she was about to take felt daunting. Huge in the way that galaxies were. She knew what it would take to cross this desert again, probably more than it had taken to get here. She followed Jerry the whole way before, walking behind him, next to Tim, content that when they arrived here they could find peace. They could rest.

Now she was going to walk back the way she had come, but there wouldn’t be anyone to follow this time. She had a destination, but no one would be walking in front of her, no one beside her. Tim wasn’t making this journey. Tim was done, done with Jerry, done with The Named, done with all of it. Keke had thought she was as well, thought she would settle down here in this town and try to make something of it. Try to have a life that resembled the one she had back in the city. Before The Named. Before Jerry. Everyone here wanted that and Keke couldn’t point to a single event that changed their minds. It was the culmination of act after act, of disappointment on disappointment, of death piled on death.

The group that once thought they would overthrow the existing system was now content toiling away in the sun like the slaves of old.

Keke wasn’t walking back out into the desert because of that, though. She held no allegiance to The Named, not anymore. It didn’t sadden her that the smartest people in the world had decided that this was the life they wanted, one of hiding forever, one without a chance at anything really—anything outside of life. If that made them happy, then fine. If Tim wanted to stay, the last of The Eight, and oversee much of what happened, then fine. She wasn’t angry at him, not nearly as angry with him as he was with her for leaving.

She was turning out into the desert because Caesar had.

That was it.

Jerry knew the risk when he started this whole thing. Jerry knew that he might die, and he had lived an awfully long time as it was. If Jerry died, if Paige died, that was what they had signed up for. Really, the entire Named had signed up to die the moment they left the cities. The moment that they realized they were Unnecessary. That was the life they chose, so to get angry or upset when it happened was senseless.

No, the reason she was leaving this ancient place wasn’t to save Jerry, specifically, nor to keep Paige safe. It was because someone that barely knew any of them, barely knew The Named at all, had decided to try. Caesar turned out into the desert with only an application beside him. He was taking all the risk, putting everything on his shoulders, while the people that had sworn to do so stayed back, hiding. Keke wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have some stranger live the life she was tired of, wouldn’t go down in some historical context as being the person who sat this thing out.

She turned around and looked at the desert stretching for miles in every direction. Stretching as far as her eyes could see. It was going to be a trek unlike any she had ever made, and in the end, it might be for nothing. She might show up to Allencine and find Caesar already dead. Killed or captured. Still though, if anything was ever written about this, it wouldn’t say she had stayed behind. It wouldn’t say that she had toiled in the sun while someone else went to battle in her stead.

Keke started walking, one foot in front of the other, to find Caesar.

*

“Now, I didn’t expect to see this,” Bradley said. “It is the slightest bit amusing, however.”

Caesar heard the application but didn’t look over to the flying orb.

He couldn’t pull his eyes from what lay in front of him.

“What’s happened?” He asked, hoping that Grace might know, hoping that one of these two applications by him might have a clue.

He stood in front of Allencine, the entire city aflame.

“I don’t know,” Grace answered him.

“Seems like your kind might have finally figured out a way to fuck up everything The Genesis gave you,” Bradley said from his place to the left of Caesar. They had picked him up on the way through, crossing by the cave to see if there might have been any hints left by Manny. There wasn’t. Just the prick application who hid when Manny showed up. Something isn’t quite right about that guy, Bradley said when they arrived. Caesar took him because…well, mainly because he didn’t know what to expect when he arrived in Allencine, and an application he could control might be useful.

Usefulness had left Caesar’s realm of thinking though as he looked at his hometown. He had never seen anything like it before, never even envisioned something of this magnitude.

Smoke billowed from buildings, floating up into the air and darkening the sky. He could see the ransacked buildings, the fire licking up some of the skyscrapers. Some still stood without any damage, sure, but even one building burning was more than anyone inside Allencine had ever imagined possible. What was happening? What had gone wrong?

Jerry and Paige were in there with Manny. Leon too. Caesar had come to find them and then figure out the rest of this whole fucking mess, but now he was walking into a place bursting at the seams with violence. It was as if the pressure Caesar had felt growing in him when he lived here had finally infected the city, finally erupted, spreading that anger and hate to everyone.

“We’re not really going in there, are we?” Bradley asked. “I mean, that would just be stupid.”

They were going in. Without a doubt. Caesar wasn’t leaving the three of them in there, in that burning city.

“You know we are,” Grace said, almost absently.

“You should have left me in the cave.”

Caesar swallowed, unsure where even to start. He stood a thousand yards outside of the city, could see trains still zipping along through the air, doing their best to act as if the city wasn’t burning below them. The applications inside those trains must be losing their minds, unable to cope with the violence beneath. Why hadn’t The Genesis intervened? Why wasn’t The Genesis stopping this? He couldn’t answer any of these questions standing outside, looking in.

“He said he was at my parents’ apartment.”

No one responded. They were waiting on him to decide. Waiting on him to lead. He had gone into cities before, killed before, but never walked into an active war zone. Never felt the heat of flames as things around him burned. He was scared, that’s what he realized staring at the disaster. He was scared of what he would see. He was scared of what might befall him. He was going inside this city, not for The Genesis, but for three people who wouldn’t really help further that cause—the one of finding The Genesis. He would walk inside this hell and risk himself, risk dying before he had the chance to make things right with The Genesis. That scared him, that he might die here in some silly attempt to save those that would end up dying anyway. Everyone died. Everyone died and then lived forever inside The Genesis’ mind.

“You don’t know what’s going on?” he asked Grace, whether stalling for time or genuinely curious, he didn’t know.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“And you?” he asked Bradley.

“Your kind are insane. That’s all I know.”

Caesar put his hands in his pockets and looked down at his shoes. He had to go in. If he died, then he died, and The Genesis won. He looked up at the flames trying their very best to lick the sky. He would just need to make sure he didn’t die.

To be concluded in The Singularity: Revolutionary…

The Singularity:

Revolutionary

by David Beers

Copyright © 2015 by David Beers

The Genesis once remade the world for peace. Now, it uses a sadistic application, Mock, to remake the world yet again. This time, though, when Mock finishes, only ash and blood will remain of humanity’s legacy.

While the world crumbles, Manny holds on to all that Caesar loves. Leon and Paige locked away in a room full of pain, and Caesar unable to make his way to them. The remaining humans built their fortress around Manny, intent on killing anyone and anything even partially resembling The Named.

Caesar must decide what is more valuable to him, humanity or those he loves. In this climactic conclusion to the epic science fiction thriller, everything Caesar fights for balances on a single choice, one that only he can make, one that will transform the future of the human race.

To receive any one of David’s books for free, sign up to his Insider Club at: davidbeersauthor.com/mailing-list

Chapter One

The Life of Caesar Wells

I told you this wouldn’t end well. I honestly tried to warn you at the beginning, so that if you started reading this you would be prepared for what happened.

I’ll finish Caesar’s story here. This is emotional for me, because… because there was so much potential. So much greatness. I never believed in what he was doing, never thought that humanity should exist without The Genesis guiding it—and even if that might change some here, I certainly never wanted Caesar to change. I never wanted him broken. The man I grew up with, the man I followed nearly to my death, he was a good person. Part of him, at least. Always part of him. I’m not sure that part exists anymore, though.

This is Caesar’s story, but I suppose I should put a piece in here about me as well. Judge me the way you see fit. I tried to be Caesar’s friend. I tried to be Paige’s friend. I even learned to respect Jerry, despite everything. Was I strong? No. Was I smart? No. But I was Caesar’s friend, his first, and I can say that I was his friend until the end. I can say I loved him for what he was and for what he could have been. I even love what he’s become. I can’t stop loving Caesar.

So this is the end, and if you’ve come this far, then let’s walk the rest of the way—just don’t expect to enjoy it.

Chapter Two

Jerry regained consciousness without realizing it, and perhaps that was because he didn’t understand he had been unconscious. One second there was nothing and the next, thoughts. Not many, mostly just an awareness. The chip inside his head hadn’t stopped working though. The wires moving through him, somehow still connecting his head to his torso, even though stretched and strained, sent charges from his brain to the rest of his body—keeping his mechanical heart beating, allowing his lungs to move slightly, enough to provide the few human cells still inside him with oxygen. The chip in his head kept trying, kept pushing the organism it inhabited. That need for survival, that need to continue existing at all costs was somehow implanted in the chip—a desire to keep its host alive. So it worked on, slowly giving cognitive functions back to Jerry.

Even so, it could only bring him a fraction of the way back to normal. There wasn’t any way to physically reconnect his head to his body. There wasn’t any way to get him up and moving. The most the chip could do was keep his heart beating and allow him to process some information.

Jerry gained awareness, and then he gained consciousness. His right eye returned to him, although his left was still completely black, unable to see anything. His right eye first saw the floor, the digital material that now looked like carpet but when he had entered this apartment a year ago—when he found Caesar searching through his family’s belongings—it had resembled wood. Jerry knew where he was, and the chip was now feeding him all that it observed over the past week. It didn’t know everything; after Manny attacked him, there was a long period of blackness, like he was sleeping, but slowly the chip regained control of its functions, recording everything.

He was here, in Caesar’s parents’ old apartment. Paige was in here somewhere, so was Leon. Manny too, and Jerry barely believed what the chip told him. He didn’t even want to search through the data, didn’t want to know. Jerry shoved it away, disgusted and frightened. He could have laid here and died. That would have been better. What the chip showed him was unspeakable.

Jerry wanted to close his eye, wanted to welcome the blackness again, but couldn’t. He could do nothing but lie on the floor, in a hallway, and think that soon he would see Manny. Actually view what his mentee had become.

Where was Caesar? Jerry tried to reach out, but it was as useless as trying to blink. No function, not outside of his ability to observe and to think. He tried to remember when he spoke to Caesar last, and thought that Caesar said he was heading to Vegas. Thought that he told Caesar about Manny. Caesar hadn’t made it in time.

Now he lay here, discarded in a hallway much like a junked piece of machinery, listening as Manny continued his growth into a monster. He had control over Leon and Paige, Jerry was sure of that, or else none of this would be possible.

A strong breeze blew in through the shattered window, making its way to the hall, bringing goose bumps to Jerry’s flesh—though he couldn’t rub his arms.

He had woken up captured like this before, by The Genesis, thinking that all was lost. Thought that it could get no worse. Now, though, he knew that had been a silly, naive thought. He laughed to himself, because back then his head had been fully attached. No longer, Jerry. Then, Caesar had been with him. No longer, Jerry. Then Paige, and even Leon, had been relatively safe. No longer, Jerry.

He wanted to call out to Paige, to comfort her the best he could. He wanted to get up and walk them out of here. None of that would happen though. He would never comfort anyone again. He would never walk again. Jerry would die here in this hallway under the boot of someone he once loved. He would die, and Paige would die, and Leon would die. Maybe not Caesar, though. Maybe he could still push forward. Maybe he could finish what Jerry started. It felt odd, accepting death, accepting the death of those you care about. What other choice did he have, though? Lying here in this hallway, ripped apart? None. Jerry had gone as far as he could and now Caesar would have to finish this. The most Jerry could hope for would be a quick death for everyone in this apartment, although he doubted such would happen.

*

Manny truly didn’t understand how he hadn’t seen it before. It was so obvious now, had been staring him in the face for years on end. All the suffering he put himself through, all the pain, was for nothing. He could smile about it a little, at how wrong he had been, but he was also shocked at how long it took him to realize the truth.

Brandi didn’t die. Jerry had tried to kill her, sure, but he wasn’t successful. Manny wondered if Jerry knew that, if he knew that his carefully plotted plan for The Named, and specifically Brandi and Dustin, had failed. He would find his son once more, and now, Brandi had returned. How long had she been here? And to think that Manny wanted to hurt Paige, wanted to hurt her to get back at Caesar. That was funny too, goodness, wasn’t it? That stretched a mile wide smile across Manny’s face when he thought about it. He had been prepared to rape Paige, would have done it even if he didn’t enjoy it—because this had never been about Paige, really, but about delivering justice to Caesar—only out of necessity. But he didn’t need to. He didn’t need to rape Paige at all, because it wasn’t Paige lying there on the couch. Well, not totally. The transformation was slow, to be sure, but slow and steady won the race, right? Parts of Paige were still there, but Brandi was returning. So when Manny went to her, when he climbed on top and thrust inside her, Brandi wanted it. Brandi loved him. Brandi missed him. And now she was almost home, almost here .

Dustin lived outside the apartment and Manny would go get him soon enough. He wanted to introduce their baby to Brandi again, to give her a chance to get used to how he looked—although he didn’t think that would matter to her. Brandi would love Dustin no matter what, and hell, Brandi looked different now too. Not that Paige had been a bad looking woman, just different is all, and that didn’t bother Manny in the slightest. He loved his wife.

So that was the good part about all of this. He didn’t need to rape Paige to hurt Caesar. Because Paige had been okay. In the end, she was on the wrong side of things, but that was mainly Jerry and Caesar’s fault. He could forgive her and now he didn’t have to hurt her. He could still hurt Caesar pretty bad without Paige. There was Leon. There was Jerry. Manny would get a lot of miles from both of them, and there was a lot to do before Caesar arrived. When he showed up, he would hardly recognize those two pimps.Either of them. Jerry had pimped The Named for years, using them for his own benefit, and Leon…well, maybe Leon was a whore, being used by everyone around him. Either way, they were getting what they deserved.

Once Manny killed Caesar, all of this could end. He and Brandi could take their son, fix the window in the front room, and live here as a family. They could make another baby, even. And goodness, that would be absolutely great. Two children, brothers hopefully. The Genesis would still exist , sure, but things had changed in regards to it. Things changed because Manny changed. Manny wasn’t under The Genesis’ jurisdiction anymore. He was outside of it, outside of all those controls. So The Genesis could live and Manny would be fine with it; as long as he had his family, there wasn’t anything to worry about. That’s what he learned from this: family trumped everything.

He stood across the room from Paige, watched her lying on the couch perfectly still. Her face looked as beautiful as the moment they started walking across the desert. Manny still wasn’t allowing her to move—not even when he made love to her—because he knew part of Paige was still in there and he didn’t want to have to hurt Brandi. She lay on her stomach and stared down at the floor, the tears across her face having dried to salty streaks. He hadn’t given her a shower yet, even though she needed one. He would soon, but he wanted to watch Brandi take a shower by herself; he didn’t want to control his wife while she was in there.

Manny kept from looking over at Leon, because whenever he did, anger rose up in him. Anger at Leon’s stupidity, at his blind and misplaced love for Caesar. He didn’t want to contrast the grotesqueness, indeed the massacre, that Leon was becoming with the beauty of his wife. Not right now. He wanted to just look at the woman becoming his wife and be at peace. For the first time in a long time, Manny would be at peace.

Chapter Three

The train flew around the city as if everything was normal. It passed through the air like a film of smoke didn’t coat its windows, like grit and dirt didn’t line its entire body. It moved above the world like fire wasn’t raging beneath.

Caesar stood in the train, staring straight down, looking at the mess beneath him. He was going to descend into it very soon, descend by himself for the most part. Grace could do nothing, and Bradley was little more than a sarcastic toy. Caesar would be alone in the world below, and not a single bit of it was pretty.

How had it happened? That question continually plagued him, continually jumped into his mind, because it shouldn’t have been possible. Not right now, not with The Genesis in charge. It made no sense, and yet, here it was, fire and death erupting on the streets that he had walked just a single year ago.

The train started its descent, heading to the ground, still following its schedule. The train wouldn’t be late, even if Caesar and the two applications with him were its only occupants. As Caesar moved closer and closer to the ground, his eyes moved from looking down to looking to his side, seeing that what had once been a mile below him was now only separated by the clear metal of the train.

The door opened and Caesar stepped out, the smell of burning fuel immediately assaulting his nose. He squinted his eyes, trying to block out the smoke wafting over his face. Two people streaked in front of him, one holding their hands over their head, as if trying to block an object that wasn’t there but would be shortly. They ran to his left and Caesar looked to his right, trying to understand what they were running from, and seeing it easily enough. A group of ten, both men and women, followed quickly, most holding weapons of some sort—knives, wooden sticks and boards, apparently whatever they could find. They passed by Caesar without looking at him.

All but one.

A man, almost a boy, stopped when he saw Caesar, his jog slowing as his head turned and then finally halting completely. He held a knife in his right hand and walked back a few feet to stand in front of Caesar.

Caesar went forward with his mind immediately, searching the man.

He found something he didn’t understand.

A rage twisted with an innate fear. Those emotions had been directed at the two people running, but now they looked directly at Caesar, now they questioned who he was—What side’s he on? ran through the man’s head. He was already seriously considering raising the knife and simply cutting Caesar.

For what, though?

Why was he holding the knife in the first place? Why was he so angry?

Caesar pushed deeper as the man raised the knife—slowly as he thought it through, wondering whether the man in front of him, this man that had stepped off an empty train, should live or die. Caesar went through his history quickly, looking at the days just passed, seeing what he had done. Murder. Rape. Both within the past week, though the man felt every bit of it was justified. The rape, something that should have disgusted even the hardest individual, was fine in this man’s mind. Was A-Okay.

The man plunged the knife forward, having made his decision that Caesar was too strange, too new not to kill.

Caesar stopped the man’s muscles in mid-movement. The knife stood a few inches from Caesar’s gut, and Caesar kept sifting through memories until he found what he thought he wanted. He couldn’t be sure, but if he went further back in the man’s memories—before that moment—the violence stopped.

A pill, the man had been given a pill by his friend, and he took it.

An anti-virus.

Jesus Christ, Caesar thought.

The man ingested something; all these people had ingested something. A Representative. That’s who had given these things out, but there weren’t any more Representatives. There hadn’t been any for years and years. Nine hundred, maybe. Yet, this man was confident that’s where the pill came from. An anti-virus to protect against The Named, and who else would they need protection against? The people he was chasing were part of The Named, and he thought Caesar must have been part of the group too, simply because the man didn’t know him.

Caesar stepped aside and walked the man into the train, the doors closing as he stepped on. Caesar released control and heard the man screaming, demanding something or other. Caesar looked to his left again, hoping that the people he had seen running were safe. There wasn’t anyone on the street though, just the endless smoke that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“That was too fucking much,” Bradley said. Caesar had kept the application close, almost absentmindedly. If he released it, the thing would fly off. “You better protect me from these beasts.”

“What next?” Caesar asked.

“Head to your parents’ apartment?” Grace said.

Caesar nodded, taking a right, heading in the direction the people with weapons came from.

*

Manny held the child up in front of him, inspecting it. Child wasn’t right though, he held Dustin, inspected Dustin.

It hadn’t taken long for Manny to find the boy, and Manny blamed that on providence. The surrogate and the boy had been hiding in an apartment a few floors down, separated from the crop when all this started and now hiding from the mess brewing outside. She screamed a whole lot, and Manny wasn’t really mad at her; he probably would have done the same thing, but this wasn’t her child. It was Manny’s. It was Brandi’s. The kid knew it, obviously; that’s why he was crying right now, looking back at Manny, happy to finally be with his real father.

Manny reached up and wiped a slight smear from the child’s face. A small streak of blood that needn’t be there when Dustin saw Brandi for the first time, again. Manny wanted the boy clean, for sure. Everything else looked in tip-top shape.

The door to his apartment opened in front of Manny and he stepped through. Paige was still where he left her; he wasn’t completely ready to call her Brandi yet, because if she was fully Brandi, he could free her from this prison. She wasn’t ready though. Manny could still feel Paige’s anger, still feel her fear. It had lessened though, without any doubt. And it would continue to lessen as Brandi came more and more to the forefront. Soon he could call her Brandi, soon she would be just his wife. He still wanted her to see their child though; Paige might not appreciate it totally, but Brandi—the woman inside—she would for sure. She would understand what he meant by handing her this baby, by handing her Dustin.

He lifted Paige so that she sat up on the couch, her arms at her side, staring straight forward. He released her eyes, and they immediately jerked to where he stood. Nothing else moved though, not her mouth or her body—he wanted Paige quiet while Brandi got a good look at Dustin. He walked across the room, and sat down next to her, placing Dustin in her lap, holding him steady there, so that she could gaze at him.

*

“It’s Dustin, honey. Do you see?”

Paige heard the words, heard them because this fuck was sitting right next to her, their legs touching.

Just not his hands. Just don’t let his hands touch me.

The child looked immaculately clean, but contrasted with Manny’s hands, the baby looked like a porcelain statue standing in a pool of blood. Manny’s hands were covered, nearly drenched in someone else’s life, reaching up to his mid-forearms. The baby wore overalls, and while the blood hadn’t reached the child’s skin yet, it was smearing across his clothes.

How old was this child? A year? He stuck one of his fingers in his mouth, looking up at Paige with wondering eyes.

Paige didn’t want to cry again. She had cried too much, cried too long, and she knew that a lot more tears were yet to come. Knew that none of this was over, that it was only just beginning. Yet, she couldn’t help it, looking at the kid on her lap and the blood stained hands that held him there. This child, wherever he had come from, he would never return.

The tears rolled down her face, though she wasn’t allowed to make any noises. It was strange, at least at first, crying silently, unable to fully express the sadness welling up inside her. She grew somewhat used to it, this almost constant crying without a single word or sound escaping her mouth. When Manny plunged into her, when he cut on Leon, when he dragged Jerry out of the front room to a hallway—his wires and chords dragging behind his dead body. She cried during all of it without a single sound escaping her lips. So what was one more time? What was once more, to cry for this child who would probably end up dead long before he reached another birthday.

Oh, God, where is Caesar? She thought. The same thought that always came back to her. The same thought that had been almost constant since he left. How long had it been now? Paige didn’t know. He wasn’t coming. He wouldn’t find her, wouldn’t find any of them. So why keep wondering about him? Why keep asking that question?

Because I love him.

She looked over to Manny, whose eyes focused on the boy. Insane didn’t begin to describe this stupid, stupid fuck. How many times had he taken her so far? Twenty? More? Three times a day, at least, and each time he filled her with his seed. Each fucking time he increased the chances that she would grow pregnant with his real child, not this stranger he called Dustin. Looking at Manny, at his eyes, she knew that he actually believed this baby was his child. He held no doubt about it.

And now the child looked up at her like she might be his mother.

I’m so sorry, sweetie, she thought, looking back into the boy’s wondering eyes.

Chapter Four

“They’re inside that building. No doubt about it.”

Theo listened to the man, hating how uncomfortable his suit felt. It always felt like this, a heaviness to it that drove him mad, like a lead blanket draped around him. He wanted to take it off, wanted to burn the goddamn thing if he was being honest, though that wasn’t even in the realm of possibility.

What was this person’s name? He couldn’t remember it, though he’d just been told.

Alan?

Alex?

Andrew. That was it. Andrew. And, Andrew was most definitely insane. Crazy just like the rest of the people that came to Theo, like the rest of the people Theo led. Turmoil didn’t describe the city right now; turmoil was a relatively nice word, one that might have seemed quaint if Theo were to walk outside and take a stroll around the block. He wasn’t going to, though. He didn’t want to see anymore. The mess, the buildings with broken windows and the ransacked stores. He didn’t want to see the dead being dragged through the streets by their hands and feet. He didn’t want to see any of it because he knew where it started—with him.

Yet, he didn’t keep it going; this thing was an animal unto itself, an animal that only thought it needed Theo’s permission to eat.

That’s why Andrew was here.

Everything they planned ran through Theo first, per Mock’s wishes.

“What building is it?” Theo asked.

“Torrence Apartments.”

“We haven’t already been there?”

“No way,” Andrew said. “Place is infested with The Named.”

“How do you know?” Theo asked because he still found it curious, how fucking stupid their answers were. Not humorous, there wasn’t anything funny about this enterprise, but interesting nonetheless. Because all of their answers were nothing. Everything they thought was only the anti-virus coursing through their blood, perhaps even affecting their DNA.

“I was there, visiting my cousin. He kept going to use the bathroom. I mean constantly, Mr. Yellen. He said he drank a lot of water after a jog or something, but it was bullshit. He was recording me and then hiding the recordings in his bathroom.”

Theo looked at the man, wondering how in the hell he could say that and look Theo in the eye? How in the hell he could know a cousin his entire life and suddenly be completely convinced that same man was working for some covert organization? Some organization that hardly existed, if Mock was to be believed—which Theo did, because Mock took some sick pleasure in all of this, in knowing that everything was a lie.

And here this man was, this Andrew, playing right into it.

“So what do you think we should do?” Theo asked, already knowing the answer. All of these people only gave one answer, and what if Theo told them no? They would do it anyway. They would run in and kill everyone they could, anyone that didn’t hide or run. They would murder them even as their victims screamed for mercy. Theo wouldn’t say no, though. Of course he wouldn’t. Because if he said no, his own murder would follow very soon, delivered by the cruelest god Theo could imagine: Mock.

“We’ve got to get in there. We’ve got to root those people out.”

Theo wanted to sigh, felt the need out of simple boredom, out of the stupidity he saw all day, every day. He sat in that old church, the one where he made his proclamation about the need to go after The Named. He operated out of an office in the back, watching different shows that came on the entertainment center he made Mock bring him. He watched and waited for people to show up demanding that buildings be sacked or people be murdered publicly in the streets. There was a lot of that, surprisingly enough. People needed to know that The Named’s infiltration wouldn’t be tolerated, Theo supposed, as if the actual blood on the streets and the smoke in the air wouldn’t send the message.

“Give me some time to think on it,” Theo said, which was the closest he had ever come to saying no. He was just tired of it. Tired of this room, tired of being scared to walk outside because of what he would see.

And now, in Andrew’s eyes, he saw a flicker of anger.

“Why?” Andrew asked.

No one had questioned Theo before. Yes, sir; No, sir. That’s what Theo was used to.

“Excuse me?” Theo asked.

“Why? Why do you need to think on it? Why can’t I just do it now?”

Theo stood up, not angry, but frightened. He knew what this could lead to: if Andrew left angry with him, rumors would circle that he was The Named. That The Named had even infiltrated The Genesis’ structure, and they would string Theo up on the roads right next to the other dead bodies.

“What the fuck did you just ask me? Did you ask me why?” Theo pointed to the patch on his chest. “You see that? That means you don’t fucking ask me questions. It means I make the rules. It means if you question me again, instead of a noose outside, I’m going to arrange for a vat to be brought out and you placed in it. You got that?”

The anger in Andrew’s eyes died and he looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry.”

“Get the fuck out of here. I’ll let you know in a few hours what I want to do.”

The man rushed out of the room and Theo sat back down, his heart beating so hard he thought it might break through his chest.

*

Mock stood up, arms open as if it was welcoming home a son from college. It was, of course, only trying to piss Theo off a bit. The door shut behind Theo and as Mock moved around to the front of its own desk, arms still wide, Theo sat down in the chair.

“This is beyond ridiculous now, Mock.”

“No hug?”

Theo didn’t even look up.

“Fine. Fine. No need to show how much you care for me,” Mock said, moving back around to its own chair. “What do you mean, beyond ridiculous?”

“The things these people are wanting to do.”

“Do tell, do tell,” Mock said.

“You love hearing this, don’t you? Makes you feel good?”

Mock wanted to smile at that, it truly did. Theo was growing disgusted, at himself, at Mock, at the whole business. Even saying that to Mock was more than he would have done at the beginning. This wasn’t the man that had followed behind Mock on the staircase, answering only the questions it asked—not venturing any of his own. Mock liked the change because it wanted to see how far it could push this human. How far before Theo just went off the rails and Mock had to put him down. Was the limit approaching? Not too close, Mock didn’t think, but definitely inching nearer.

“Yes, I suppose it does. You don’t?”

“No.”

“Anyway, what’s new? What’s so ridiculous?”

“Today one comes in and says his cousin, a man he’s known his whole life, is working for The Named. Why? Because his cousin kept using the restroom during the man’s visit. So now the man thinks we need to go in there and kill everyone.”

Mock clapped its hands. “Yes! That’s what we like to hear!”

Theo just stared at it, not saying anything, not amused by Mock’s antics, and Mock liked that too. The annoyance on the man’s face, the annoyance he felt for this whole thing.

“So when are you going into the building?” Mock asked.

“Today, I suppose. I wanted to come tell you before I went in, though now, I don’t see why I wanted too.”

“Yes, you did kind of waste your time with that one. I won’t say you wasted my time, Theo, because you’re always welcome here.”

The two stared at each other, neither saying anything. Finally Theo stood up and walked out of the room. Mock watched him go, watched the door close behind him. It wasn’t nearly as giddy as it sounded in front of Theo. There wasn’t room for that kind of emotion in Mock, in what it was doing here. Mock did it to piss off the human, to push him just a bit further each time they spoke. This was serious business, and things were progressing nicely, but Mock wasn’t sure it would reach the perfect crescendo. There was still more to do. Destroying buildings and hanging people from light poles was nice, but this needed to spread. Outside of Allencine. Mock wasn’t sure how to do that yet, and not knowing bothered it. Mock didn’t want to go to The Genesis and ask; no, it needed to figure this out alone.

Theo was fine, even if his purpose had been served already. He could keep watching over this destruction, for a little while at least, but soon everyone in this city would be dead. Already, the people who took the pills were turning on each other, the anger not just holding itself to the people who hadn’t taken the ‘anti-virus’. Murder would go on and on until there was no one left to murder, and Theo didn’t need to preside over it all. The fun part with him would be to see whether he self-destructed or whether Mock would need to do it.

Time would tell.

*

Fuck Mock.

Theo stood outside of the apartment complex because Mock sat behind a desk, and Theo wouldn’t behave the same as that thing. He wasn’t going to sit behind his desk while Andrew and The Insane went inside this complex and murdered everyone they could find. He stood behind the crowd, on top of a train that he had stopped for this very purpose. He looked out at the people around him—hundreds, at least. They held weapons Theo hadn’t known existed, things he couldn’t describe besides relating them to other objects. One looked like a box, but he knew that no one showed up to this thing to kill with a box. Whatever was inside that little nicety would probably do a lot of damage.

Everyone stared forward, not bothering to look back at Theo—all of them a silent mass of rage. It had been easy to get them all here, with more arriving every second. The first people, those at the front, would probably end up trampled, killed by those that came after. Did they know that or were they too worked up to even care? What did it matter? Theo hoped they were trampled. Hoped that the people inside were prepared to fight this group, though he knew they weren’t.

Most of them were probably hiding inside their apartments, hoping not to be found. He could see a small group standing in the lobby, weapons in their own hands, but they would be murdered in moments. The people out here were battle scarred. The people out here were bloodthirsty. The people inside were scared and weak, and this would end quickly. Painfully.

You don’t have to do this. You can tell them no. You can have them turn on you and cut you down and be done with the whole thing, the whole mess. Just say no.

He wanted to. He truly did. He didn’t want to watch this. He’d seen enough death. He had caused enough. And with each person that died because of him, he felt his life growing that much cheaper. He sold his soul already, so why keep piling on the bodies? Why put more on his shoulders? His life was already over and he knew it. There wasn’t any way he made it out alive, so he was just trying for a few more days. Just trying to hold on a bit longer.

If the ends justified the means, then all he was doing was justifying his own death with the death of others. Pointless.

And yet, he wouldn’t tell them no. He wouldn’t say anything like that to these people. He was going to let them head inside and do their work, while he sat outside and watched.

Theo sighed.

Enough thinking. If he didn’t give the go ahead, these people would end up rushing in on their own, taking what little power he now held with them.

He nodded to the man standing next to him.

“TAKE THEM!” The man shouted into a small globe he held. The sound echoed out of the globe booming across the crowd of people.

The first row surged forward, smashing into the doors that on normal days would have opened automatically. This wasn’t a normal day, however. Those doors were locked, though the people doing the locking must have known it wouldn’t help. The first five or six hacked away at the digitally made doors, trying to break through the electrical currents that kept out the elements and unwanted guests. A solid minute of banging put huge holes in the see-through doors, and in another thirty seconds, the holes fell away, leaving room for people to begin stepping through.

None of them stepped through, however. The crowd behind the first group pushed forward, slamming their own comrades through the doors, causing them to sprawl forward onto the hard lobby floor in front of them. No one reached down to pick them up. No one even looked at the people they just sentenced to death. They ran forward, weapons brandished, and met the small group there to fend off the horde of anger.

Theo watched it all from the safety of his train. He watched as more and more piled into the building, killing their perceived enemy, killing their friends. Killing everyone they could, because what else was there anymore? After a few minutes, as the group began to disperse into the building, moving upwards, away from Theo’s eyesight, he hopped off the top of the train and walked around to its front doors. They opened and he stepped in, moving to a seat in the middle of the train. He sat down and listened to the screams echoing out of the building, hearing glass breaking as windows shattered and bodies were tossed out of them. Hearing the thuds as those same bodies hit the ground with tremendous force.

*

Caesar stood in the corner of the lobby. A group of thirty stood in the middle, but they barely noticed him. They must have thought he lived here, and he wasn’t posing a threat like the people outside, so what did he really matter?

Caesar brought his group of three to his parents’ apartment complex a few hours before. He hadn’t marched up to the apartment immediately because of the buzz moving through the place. People were rushing in and out, weapons being carried in. He sat in the lobby and listened to the people as they spoke, doing his best to look worried. A man not nervous right now would be noticed, because everyone else was terrified. They all wanted out, but had nowhere to go.

“Someone on the sixtieth floor. I heard his cousin turned him in, said he was part of The Named, and now we all are, apparently.”

The words transferred from one occupant to another, and Caesar heard them all. An assault was being planned, an assault on this building, on the inhabitants.

I can’t kill Manny and then try to get the three of them out of here safely, not if it’s as bad as these people think it will be, he told Grace.

“You’re probably right.”

So just wait?

“I would. See what happens, then decide whether to come back or stay. Manny can probably protect them if that’s what he wants to do.”

And if he doesn’t? Caesar asked.

“There aren’t any certainties here.”

He knew she was right. It would take more than a few minutes to dispatch Manny and then he would have to navigate whatever happened down here, and he had no idea what that would look like. If Manny barricaded himself in up there, he could probably withstand whatever these people brought. Caesar couldn’t imagine a reason why Manny would want to let the mob outside kill his prizes, besides the fact that he was insane—which was a pretty big reason. Still, barricaded in with Manny, Paige and Leon would most likely survive. Out in the open with Caesar? He just didn’t know if he could protect them, and what good would it do to march up there and grab them only to have them all die in this lobby?

Caesar decided to wait, to watch what happened down here, to better understand just what the hell was going on. Manny wasn’t going to kill them, not until Caesar showed up and he had the chance to show off all his hatred in one gallant effort.

Still, even after hearing the fear in the people around him, the ferocity of the attack still shocked him.

Caesar pushed Bradley up to the ceiling, away from any possibility of him being harmed. He didn’t care if Bradley died; he cared that he might need him at some point and wouldn’t have him. Grace stayed with him, next to his ear, as the creatures that had once been human swarmed forward. It’s not that they looked different; of course they didn’t—they all were normal looking people, but the similarities seemed to end there. These things battered at the digital doors with a hate that Caesar thought resembled Manny, resembled his insatiable need to hurt Caesar. And these people? What did they want? To hurt whoever was inside of this place. Nothing else. Just to hurt and hurt and hurt.

Their faces twisted into gross caricatures of what they should have been. Their mouths bent and their faces seemed to crack with the lines creasing across their skin. Veins poked out across their foreheads and arms as they pummeled the doors in front of them, wanting desperately to get inside.

The chip in Caesar’s brain allowed him to take this all in calmly, allowed him to contrast the people trying to get in with the people trying to keep them out. The ones inside, they were frightened. They knew death had arrived and it wasn’t just knocking on the door, but trying to bulldoze right through it. Trying to take them all in one large swallow, where they would fall down and down its black esophagus until they reached its stomach—which was a cold, cold place. They held their weapons, but their grips weren’t from anger, but fear. Sweat on their palms and face instead of veins pumping with hot blood. The people standing thirty feet from Caesar would fight, but they would die. That was clear, and everyone involved knew it.

The doors started cracking, the digital code built to withstand the elements unable to handle this assault. A few more moments and everything would begin in earnest.

Caesar watched as the doors fell and then the people attacking them fell, watched as brothers and sisters in arms ran over them without a second thought, their heads being repeatedly slammed into the cold floor until their blood was the first to streak the clean lobby.

The two sides met, brandishing weapons that ranged from a thousand years old to things that might have been created last night inside random apartments.

“Do something,” Grace said, her voice as frightened as Caesar had ever heard it.

Do what?

“Help them. Try to help them. They’re going to be massacred.”

Caesar had come here to find those he loved and bring them out. Not to save this apartment complex from assault. Not to put himself in danger, something that might prevent him from saving Paige or destroying The Genesis.

I didn’t come here to save these people, he said.

“You can’t just watch this happen.”

Caesar stepped forward and thrust his mind out across the lobby. He grabbed on to the crowd rushing in, grabbed on to their minds and started turning them. They went after each other—the blood and cries pouring out of people changed from those who lived in this place to those invading.

He had never stretched himself like this, grabbing onto at first tens of individuals, but stretching and stretching until a hundred were under his control, two hundred, but more kept coming, more kept rushing forward, not even seeing that those who went first were now trying to kill them, not seeing and not caring, because they hacked at whoever looked like the enemy. Caesar couldn’t focus on any one person, couldn’t turn his eyes to actually view these individual battles because he would lose control of the entire war.

For each new person that entered, he stretched himself, grabbing control of their mind until his own was full of nothing but the thoughts of the insane. He couldn’t think; he could only react, finding more and turning them on each other, but his limits were near. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to push this any further, knew that he would lose control and this place would be lost.

“WATCH OUT!” Grace shouted at him, slicing through the insanity that possessed his mind.

He saw the woman then, somehow missing her as she marched toward him, brandishing a metal pipe with three knives strapped to the end, the lights from above casting long dagger shadows onto the floor. He didn’t have control of her, had missed her as his mind scrambled to gather the ever increasing number. She hadn’t missed him though. She saw him and was coming to kill him, to push those pointed instruments of death into his gut.

Everything else disappeared, his hold on the hundreds of people in here, because he had seconds to make the connection with the woman in front of him.

His mind found hers as she rammed the metal pole forward, found hers as the knives moved within six inches of his body.

He stopped them, her mind screaming at him, refusing to believe that she wasn’t going to have her conquest, that she wouldn’t see his blood leak out.

The war in the lobby started afresh, with the people that he had controlled barely missing a beat as they turned back around and began going after their original targets. Whatever had stopped them wasn’t important anymore. All that mattered was murder. Caesar looked at the woman in front of him, her body still lunging forward, holding her there and listening as she screamed inside his own head, not understanding why she couldn’t kill him. There was no saving her. There was no bringing her back from this place her mind now called home.

Caesar stepped forward and pulled one of the knives from the metal pole. He brought it up to the woman’s face, both of them staring in each other’s eyes.

Quickly, he thought, and then ran the knife across the woman’s throat.

Her blood flooded out in a gush, falling to the floor like a red waterfall. He listened as her mind quieted; she didn’t stop raging, but sounded as if something was pulling the rage away, further and further down a long corridor, until nothing could be heard, and Caesar held a dead person.

His mind released her and she collapsed to the floor.

He looked up at the crowd before him. Too many. Far too many. Maybe close to eight hundred people in this small place, all of them hacking and shooting and any other verb that allowed one to kill another. He couldn’t hold them, he could do nothing for this place, and he saw eyes falling on him. Saw eyes and heard thoughts that wanted his blood to spill too. Caesar grabbed Bradley and began pushing forward, moving through the blood and bodies, towards the door, out of this place, throwing those that came at him away, moving those in front of him with the power of a sledge hammer. He had to get out. He had to find safety.

He reached the door, pushing people away from him, creating a path across the waves still trying to enter, until he finally stood on the street.

He saw the train in front of him, sitting there, not moving, not loading passengers. A man sat in there alone, looking out at the mess before him. A man wearing a black suit with a red symbol across his chest. Caesar saw the peace sign and knew what it meant.

*

The doors parted for Manny and he stepped outside into the hallway. He had heard the noises from inside his apartment, had watched the battle from his entertainment center. He didn’t know what the hell the whole thing was about but found himself growing more and more curious as the noises grew louder outside. Caesar had been downstairs; Manny saw that in the entertainment center as well. He’d been there for a while, waiting and watching. Manny had hoped he would come up, his excitement increasing until he thought he would bolt from his spot on the couch and go meet him. He hadn’t though; he couldn’t. He needed Caesar to find his way up here, he needed Caesar to see what Manny had done to those he loved. This wasn’t just about killing Caesar, it was about making him hurt first.

Manny watched as Caesar shifted the battle for a bit, watched as those bent on killing the inhabitants turned on each other. It was impressive, to say the least, seeing the whole tide of the fight change almost at once, people just turning their backs on those that they were in mortal combat with to fight someone unsuspecting. Manny had never attempted something like it, never even thought to. He controlled the people here with him, but what Caesar did downstairs was different, much more so. Manny knew the strength it took to move two people for hours on end, but to grasp a few hundred, controlling all of their motions at once?

Doubt began creeping in, but he shoved it away. There wasn’t anything to worry about. He had his wife and son, and when Caesar arrived, Manny would kill him. And if he couldn’t kill him, then The Genesis would assist. It would have to.

For one terrifying second, Manny thought his enemy would die, and he watched as the woman came within inches of murdering Caesar. Even then though, Caesar performed. He gave up control over the crowd for control over the woman, and with a ruthlessness Manny admired, Caesar killed her.

Manny kept watching the battle until there was nothing left to watch, until the mob moved through the lobby and surged upwards, ready to move through the apartments. He listened as the roar grew louder, and now he wanted to see it for himself.

A woman was being dragged from her apartment by her hair, screaming savagely. Another woman sidestepped the screaming lady as she went back into the apartment, probably to see if there was anyone else to find. The man doing the dragging brought her down the hall, arriving at a window overlooking clouds. He picked the woman up and threw with a strength that Manny imagined could only be accomplished when one had a massive adrenaline load coursing through their body. The woman collided with the window, breaking it, and falling, her screams fading immediately as the wind picked them up and swept them out of earshot.

The man turned back around and looked at Manny. Manny didn’t move; he was genuinely curious about what would happen next. He didn’t know he was smiling, didn’t know he had been smiling for the entire three hours he watched this massacre unfold. Maybe the man at the end of the hall saw that smile and knew what rested beneath, maybe he recognized the madness because it lived in him as well. Or maybe he just thought Manny was too fucking big to mess with.

Either way, he went back to the apartment he had pulled the screaming woman from, obviously intent on making sure not a single person inside continued breathing.

Manny watched for a few more minutes as people continued to come out of the elevators, continued breaking down doors and killing, killing, killing. After a while, Manny turned back and walked into his apartment. It was interesting, what was happening around him, but overall unconcerning. He had his family inside this place and no one was going to bother him. If they did, he’d make an example out of the first few, and that would keep them at bay. Nope, all that mattered to Manny was what was inside this apartment—that and when Caesar would return.

Chapter Five

The Life of Caesar Wells

I suppose I need to take some time to describe what happened to me in that apartment. I don’t want to, really. I don’t want to relive it. I don’t want to think about it, think about what he did to me or what he did to Paige. Jerry, in all honesty, got the better end of the deal. His horrors were quick.

There was the cutting of my arms. The cutting down to visible bone and then Manny treating it to keep infection from growing in the wounds. Keeping me alive, so that he could continue.

There’s gore. There was always gore in that place. Blood stained floors and blood stained sofas. So much blood that I finally stopped seeing it, sitting there frozen still, dealing with the left over pain from Manny’s last session with me. It became just another part of the apartment, like a painting on the wall. When you first put it up, you notice it, but after the hundredth time passing it, you don’t see it at all. The gore though, that doesn’t concern me. That’s temporary. Sure, I won’t forget what it looked like, watching in a mirror as I cut my own ear off. I won’t forget what the blood felt like splashing on my naked shoulder, the sheer heat of it. But an ear, with everything that’s happened and everything yet to happen? It means nothing. A grain of salt in the ocean.

The real scars, the one’s I see when I sleep, they’re all inside. Manny hovers above me, an unseen ghost that I glimpse when the darkness comes. He’s always there, always waiting on me again, to throw me back into that apartment, on that couch, and make me watch. That’s all I was, a passive observer. Nothing more. I watched him destroy me and I watched him destroy Paige. Both of us in very, very different ways, and in the end, there wasn’t much left inside either of us.

He destroyed me physically, and mentally, he took my heart. He took the piece of me that wasn’t a coward, the piece of me that stood up to him in Vegas, that told Paige to run. He took that man and turned him into a frightened child, one burnt by cigarettes and beat for spilling soda. Whenever he looked at me, I pissed myself. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; I literally urinated. He could have stopped that, controlling my bladder the way he did every other muscle in my body, but he didn’t. He let me do it time and time again, to shame me, to make me understand that I was no longer human, that I was a dog he could whip whenever he wanted.

He still looks at me, only now it’s when I dream. His eyes see through me, knowing everything I think, just as they did in that apartment. He sees my fear. He sees my hatred. He sees my love for Caesar. He sees it all and to him it’s fuel. It feeds his madness. He drinks it in like a drunk at last call, swallowing it as fast as he possibly can.

He still hurts me in my dreams, but there, he lets me know that it’ll never end. At least in that apartment, I understood that eventually I would die from my wounds. That he couldn’t doctor me up forever. That was impossible. I would die and this would end. But now, I’m not going to die for a long time. I may be missing three toes, but I can still walk. I may not have ears, but I can still hear. My lips may have scars running up and down them, but I can still talk. My brain may be scarred, but I still dream. And that’s the problem.

There’s no way to escape him now.

I imagine it was the same for Paige, though we never spoke inside that room. I imagine the sex, the goddamn rape, was awful, but that was only a part of it. It was knowing he would do it again. It was knowing we couldn’t escape. Knowledge, I’ve found, is always worse than action. Knowledge lives while action fades.

Manny haunts me, and always will, at least as much as Caesar.

Chapter Six

Grace moved through the city slowly. She wasn’t looking for anything, wasn’t trying to hide, but was thinking. She meandered through the streets, sometimes watching people rush by her, but for the most part, she was lost in her own mind. None of this made sense to her; none of it added up. The Genesis spent its entire life keeping just this scenario from occurring, keeping this at bay, and here she was, looking at The Genesis’ failure. If this was indeed its failure, then Caesar need do nothing else besides wait. Society would collapse and…what of The Genesis? Was it dying? Had some kind of virus gotten into the code?

No. That was impossible. The Genesis would never allow that to happen.

Something else, it had to be, yet Grace couldn’t figure it out. She couldn’t understand it.

She moved through a plume of smoke rising up from a burning trashcan. There was no one around it, no one trying to utilize its heat, and maybe whoever created the fire had done it for fun—just to see something burn.

They shouldn’t be here. That was the only thing Grace found she knew for sure. There were Paige and Leon to consider, sure, but she didn’t believe Caesar was going to make it out of here. Not anymore. She wouldn’t tell him that he had to leave, that he had to surrender Paige and Leon to Manny; he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t even hear her, but she knew it to be true. Whatever was happening here, whatever was still building, still growing in intensity, would destroy Caesar when it caught him. The only power in the world that could stop this was The Genesis, but where was it?

Not here, not anymore.

The questions rolled through Grace over and over again, unanswerable and yet not stopping. She spent an hour floating through the streets, aimlessly, seeing things she had never imagined, witnessing acts that made her understand the true horrors humanity was capable of. She had, before, known it intellectually, known that before The Genesis, humans were a bit more than animals, but not much. Now though, she saw it. She saw the dead on the street. She heard shrieks echoing out of buildings around her. She saw everything that The Genesis had built, the huge skyscrapers and the wondrous trains, destroyed. It didn’t make her hate humanity, but it did make her fear it. This was what Caesar wanted to set free? These people raping and pillaging everything around them?

Grace stopped.

She looked straight ahead at a woman walking along the sidewalk alone.

Grace couldn’t believe what she was seeing, surely it had to be a mistake, some kind of smoke induced hallucination.

The woman kept walking forward though, her dark brown skin getting closer and closer to Grace. It wasn’t a mistake. It was Keke, walking down the street as if she belonged here. Walking down the street by herself, as if she wasn’t going to be raped and murdered the moment someone saw her.

Grace moved, no longer floating, but traveling across electrons as fast as she could. She scooted right next to Keke’s ear, whispering so as not to startle her, “It’s Grace, Keke.”

Keke stopped, her head snapping to the direction that the voice came from, her brain not realizing there wouldn’t be anything to see.

“Keep walking. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself.”

Keke listened, moving one leg in front of the other, her face slowly finding its way back to what was in front of her.

“Where’s Caesar?” Keke asked.

“He’s hiding. I came out here to think. When did you get here?”

“A few hours ago. I didn’t really think this through; I’ve just been walking the streets, hiding whenever I see someone, hoping that I somehow found you guys.”

“You’re lucky, Keke. You’ve seen what’s happening here?”

“Yes,” Keke whispered. “What is it? What is all of this?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What about Jerry? Have you found him?”

“We know where he is,” Grace said, “but we haven’t made it to him yet. There’s…there’s been some obstacles.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “I’m hoping Caesar figures it out.”

*

Caesar hadn’t told Grace what he saw. He hadn’t told her of the red peace sign beaming from the man’s chest. He hadn’t told her about the man sitting in the train, watching the massacre with dead eyes. He hadn’t told her because he was scared of what she would say. He was scared of what it might mean. Caesar knew about the anti-virus, knew, intuitively, that it had to have something to do with The Genesis, but he didn’t realize the full scale of this until he saw the man in black.

The representative, that’s what brought Caesar to reality. Those people who died in the lobby, they had died not at a person’s hands, but at The Genesis’ will. The Genesis created this and that scared Caesar more than anything else he could think of. All of this, the fires, the death, the rage—The Genesis created all of it on purpose. That was the most frightening issue, that it had been planned, that what happened yesterday wasn’t happenstance; it was part of something that Caesar couldn’t see—the tip of an iceberg, while the rest waited deep below the ocean, waiting on Caesar’s ship to scrape across it, puncturing the metal and letting freezing water flood over everyone he loved.

He couldn’t die for Paige and Leon. That’s the conclusion he understood, and it hurt him to think it, but he couldn’t shy away from it. If they needed to die for Caesar to live, then it had to be. Neither of them could stop The Genesis, would even be able to find it. He could though, but he had to live to do it. Grace would tell him that he wouldn’t live, if he stayed here. If he told her what he saw in that train, the person and the uniform he wore, she would tell him that he was probably already dead—he just didn’t know it.

Caesar knew he should leave, but yet he sat in this room thinking. He knew he should flee the city and begin working out how he would get to Australia, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t pull himself away from this place, couldn’t just let Paige and Leon die up there.

He imagined Jerry was already dead, but Caesar had no chance of understanding the inside of that apartment without him. If Jerry was alive, if some part of his chip still functioned, Caesar might be able to tap into it. He had tried reaching for Manny again, but the connection was severed. The only way into that apartment without taking an elevator would be through Jerry, and Caesar needed to know something, needed to know anything, because if he did this—if he went against what he knew was the right course of action, then he needed to know that someone awaited him up there. He needed to know that he wasn’t going to walk into a room decorated with the skin of those he had come to save.

Caesar reached out, his mind sweeping across the space that separated him from Jerry, searching for a signal, even a pulse—some sign that Jerry still lived. He found it, a signal on the verge of dying, but a signal nonetheless. Jerry wasn’t dead; the chip in his head still connected at least some pieces of his mind.

Caesar latched onto it, downloading everything he could, everything that the chip would or could give up. Jerry said nothing, no sign that his conscious mind still worked; Caesar felt only the chip. He took it all in, everything that the chip had observed; he sat on the floor, the apartment he inhabited already having been completely ransacked, and watched as those he loved were torn apart and ruptured. Watched as the people he had come to save were abused in ways that Caesar hadn’t known possible.

He didn’t hide from it. He downloaded for hours, reliving every single moment that Paige and Leon lived through, feeling hate blooming in his heart.

Chapter Seven

“I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Theo said. “It wasn’t possible, what that man did.”

“You’re right, Theo, it isn’t possible,” Mock answered.

Theo looked at it, sitting with its feet propped up on the railing, staring off into the distance. The view would have been stunning, if not for the horror it showed. Still, as expected, Mock seemed to enjoy what it saw, sitting out here on the balcony. Theo didn’t know if it was actually Mock’s balcony, in that it had been assigned to Mock, or whether Mock simply walked in and took it. Either way, Mock was now the owner and this is where it asked Theo to meet. Not an office this time, not somewhere that hid Mock from the disaster it had created, but right where it could look down across everything.

Theo didn’t glance over the railing. He didn’t need the ivory tower view of what he had seen up close this morning.

“No, he was there. I saw him part those people like he had a force-field around him, something that wouldn’t let a single person get to him.”

“Did he see you?” Mock asked.

Theo had sat in the train and looked right at the man. Watched him walk out of that building as if nothing in the world could touch him, as if there weren’t people killing each other right beside him. Theo watched people try to get at him, try to turn their bodies toward him, and then watched as they moved to kill someone else.

Theo had never witnessed anything so strange, these people seeming to change their minds instantaneously. Had the man seen Theo? Of course. They looked right at each other, Theo in charge of a growing crowd of killers and the man alone. Yet Theo felt a hundred spiders running up and down his spine. Theo told these people to murder, but this man moved them as if the very world bent to his will. The man saw Theo, could recognize him, and Theo didn’t like it.

Because the man, for a few minutes, had changed the whole balance of the battle inside. He had turned ‘Theo’s’ people against one another, had them spill each other’s blood, and Theo did nothing but watch. Did nothing but wonder how any of this could happen, and thought for a brief moment that he would die in that train. That the man, when he finished with those inside, would come to the train and kill him.

“He saw me,” Theo said.

“Where did he go?”

“How the fuck do I know, Mock? The man controlled anyone he wanted. I wasn’t going to follow him.”

Mock didn’t say anything for a bit, just sat staring up into the blue sky. Less blue now though, always less blue because of the smoke that permeated the entire city.

“You’re sure about what you saw? Because to be frank with you, it’s not possible. I’ve seen a lot, Theo, but never mind control. It’s something from poorly written science fiction novels back when your kind wrote novels. You know what happens if you’re lying to me.”

Theo knew. Of course he knew. His entire life was now one large reminder of what happened if Mock truly became displeased.

“I’m not lying. Look, I’ll keep on keeping on, I just wanted you to know what I saw down there. If that guy is still around, he’s going to cause a lot of problems for you.”

“For us, Theo. Don’t forget, we’re a team now.”

*

Mock didn’t know if it believed Theo.

It didn’t think he was lying, per se, but more likely that Theo was simply mistaken. Mind control, regardless of what Theo said happened, wasn’t possible.

Only, Theo had come here and said it wasn’t just possible, it was happening down there in that madness. That someone was fucking up Mock’s plan. That someone wasn’t playing by Mock’s rules. It didn’t have to be mind control either; Mock knew that. There were any number of ways that what Theo thought happened could have happened.

Either way, it didn’t matter. If someone down there was doing something other than what Mock wanted, then that person needed to be dealt with. Mock didn’t know if it would tell The Genesis. Probably not.

This was Mock’s masterpiece, after all.

*

You see it now, don’t you? You see that it’s going to work. Go ahead, admit it.

The theory’s arrived?

Yes. He’s here.

Where?

He’s hiding right now, but he made a little showing today at the apartment complex. It’s not enough, what he saw today. It has to spread, to other cities. It can’t be contained to here.

Look, things are progressing nicely, I won’t say they aren’t. But what you’re doing here, what you’re setting up at the end is going to put all the power in his hands. Not in ours. When we meet, we won’t have a single bit of leverage over him. We won’t have anything. The decisions will all rest with him. I know the probabilities, but if we’re wrong…it’s all over.

Hey, have I failed you yet?

The smartest phrase humanity ever coined was ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

Zip it. I’m not going to fail. It’s all going exactly as I planned. We’re going to spread this thing, and then we’re going to go meet him. This will all be over shortly. A thousand years of plans finally achieved. Remember to thank me when it’s over.

Chapter Eight

Paige couldn’t resist when Manny climbed on top of her. Even during rapes, he held her still, not allowing her to kick or scream. Somehow, even when he came, he kept her still. The only part of Paige still free was her mind… except that wasn’t really true. Not anymore. Because now there was a large place in her mind that she didn’t dare go. The place that held Manny’s rapes, the place that took in all those memories and housed them. Only she didn’t want to go there, couldn’t go there, because her entire mental framework would collapse if she had to relive them. Bad enough that Manny kept coming back, kept taking her again and again, but to have to remember it while she lay on this couch day in and day out? It would be too much. So her body was confined, and now her mind was slowly becoming more and more inaccessible, as that place with those memories continued to grow.

He was going to impregnate her; she knew it. She knew that she would have his monstrous child, would birth something conceived in insanity. Knew that the child would be insane too, would be just like its father, and that somehow, Manny would make her care for it. Maybe he would control her for the rest of her life, making her nurse the little beast and eventually cook whole meals for it.

She lay on her side now, staring out into the living room. For some reason, Manny hadn’t brought her to the bedroom. He slept there, alone, but Paige and Leon were limited to the living room. Sometimes Manny would march Leon into the bathroom, and Leon always returned with new wounds. She hated seeing them, hated it almost as much as she hated the rapes. Leon was being torn apart in a much more serious way than Paige. She might have Manny’s child, but Leon wouldn’t have anything at all, shortly.

Manny had split Leon’s nose straight down the middle. Flayed it like a piece of meat that one wanted to make sure cooked evenly throughout. He probably bled a good bit, but when he walked back into the room—looking more like a robot than a human, Manny apparently not able to master the intricacies of movement—a salve filled the open flesh, stopping the blood flow and hopefully stopping any bacterial infection. It didn’t matter though, not really. Manny could put whatever he wanted in the wound, but tomorrow, or maybe sooner, he would bring that knife back to Leon’s skin and the torture would continue. The torture would always continue because Manny was extracting his vengeance. Righteous vengeance, that’s what Manny believed. That all of this was deserved, that all of this was because of Caesar, and Manny only making sure Caesar paid his due.

Leon sat down in his chair across the room, his hands perfectly flat on his knees. A drop of blood hung on the end of his nose. It might have been snot had the red tint and massive gash not been there. It hung, not dropping because Leon wasn’t allowed to move enough to shake it off. Paige wondered, crazily, if it tickled. If it was almost maddeningly annoying, hanging from his nose like that. Why would she think something so weird, given that lengthy hole in his face?

Paige knew what she had to do, and really, she wanted to do it. There wasn’t any doubt in her mind, no wish for another way out.

She had to kill herself. She had to find a way to die in this hellish apartment. Leon probably didn’t have to worry about that; he was going to die one way or another, either from infection or because Manny finally had enough and just ended Leon himself. Paige though? She was being fucking groomed. She was being groomed to take care of the child that Manny carried around almost constantly (except when the two of them had ‘naughty time’ as Manny called it), being groomed to take care of their possibly already conceived child. Paige would live, if Manny had anything to do with it, and she couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t allow this to continue, not forever. Caesar wasn’t going to arrive. No one was coming for her and Leon. No one was coming for Jerry. The only thing she had left, the only hope for her, was to die.

*

The three of them stood at the window, looking out. They were ten floors up, having simply walked into another completely destroyed apartment. There were blood stains on the floor and any furniture left had been ripped apart. At least it isn’t burnt though, Keke thought. There was that.

Grace had brought her back to Caesar and they found this apartment so they could watch the building across the street. The building that held Paige and Leon and Jerry. The building that Keke had traveled across the desert to see, apparently.

“It’s a fortress,” she said, her voice trailing off at the end. Caesar had told her what happened, but this was their first time looking at it since he escaped. She saw the city for herself, walking through it, doing everything she could not to be seen. She had nearly given up when Grace found her; it was why she walked the streets so brazenly. She didn’t know how she was supposed to find the two of them, didn’t know how she thought she ever would. She had just walked across the desert and now would die in some strange city on a fruitless quest. So she came out of the shadows and had Grace not found her, someone else would have, someone that probably didn’t have the best intentions.

When Grace arrived, it was like someone grabbing her hand as she thrust it out of a shark infested ocean.

Looking out at the apartment complex in front of her, she didn’t necessarily feel like she was drowning, but that the three of them now sat on a life raft, the sharks circling.

What could they possibly do to the people below them? Even Caesar had been repelled before, and now they were fortifying the place. Now they were building weapons that would fire on their own volition, that would keep invaders out without the need of a human controlling them. The people down there remembered Caesar, or rather, remembered what he had done. The ones that he didn’t kill, anyway. They remembered the feeling of someone inside their head, someone controlling their very muscles. The weapons now being put into the walls were to make sure none of that happened again.

A fortress. That was the only way Keke knew how to describe what she saw below.

“I should have gone to them,” Caesar said.

No one responded.

“I should have gone up and brought them out.”

Keke knew that Caesar had seen something; Grace told her as much. She didn’t know what it was though, only that he’d used Jerry to understand what was happening inside that building. He hadn’t spoken since then, not until now, staring across the street. Grace had brought them here and he had followed quietly.

“You didn’t know,” Grace said.

Keke didn’t want to ask what he had seen in Jerry.

“We can get inside,” Keke said. “There has to be a way.” She had come too many miles to stand here and give up. Those people down there, they had some kind of ‘anti-virus’ in them; Grace had gotten Keke up to speed. Grace believed it was something that induced anger, an almost insane rage. That didn’t mean they killed everyone though, although Keke wasn’t completely sure what helped them decide who needed to die. They still worked in cohesive groups; the fortress below showed that if nothing else. They weren’t mad zombies; they were calculating, and that meant they could probably be reasoned with, even if only a bit. That meant maybe they could be fooled. “I can get in,” she said.

“How?” Caesar asked, no surprise or reservation in his voice—a dead question.

Keke watched the people move below. The whole place was a hub of movement. The rest of the buildings in this city, once pillaged, were left alone. This one though, it wasn’t being left alone. People inhabited it, constantly dragging out the dead to the middle of the street, and moving everything from weapons to entertainment centers. They were making this into some kind of home base, she thought, something that they could operate out of. Maybe Caesar had inspired it, maybe his little resistance made these people decide they needed something more organized. Regardless, people came and went from this place. And that was how she would get in.

“I’ll become one of them, I suppose, and then I’ll just walk through the doors.”

Chapter Nine

The Life of Caesar Wells

There’s a story I haven’t told you yet, because I wasn’t sure how. You’re a thousand years down the road, or maybe time travel has been invented and you’re a thousand years in the past. Regardless, we’re not facing each other, so I’m not sure why I would have trouble telling this story, but I do. No excuses though; it needs to be told.

Manny lost control of me one time while I was in that apartment. I can’t tell you how long I was there, whether a week or a year, it was just one long day. I’ve never tried to find out because I don’t care. For the most part, the vast majority of the days, I sat in one spot on the couch, and was forced to stare at Paige just as she was forced to stare at me. When Manny took her, I was forced to watch that as well. Then, when he was ready, he’d set to carving on me some. Those were my days, over and over. Horror, followed by pain, followed by horror.

He did lose control once, though. Only once. Manny took Paige to the bedroom; I don’t know why, even now. He seemed to take pleasure in having me watch. I don’t think it was a voyeurism type thing, but I believe at least part of him knew he was assaulting Paige. At least part of him knew I cared about her. So when I watched, it hurt, and he knew it.

He took her to the bed though,just once, to rape her, and left me alone in the living room. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, his mind became so wrapped up in what he was doing, he lost me. Not for long, but for a few brief and wonderful minutes, I was free of him. It came to me slowly, not all at once, my muscles just slowly relaxing, my jaw loosening.

And then I was free. I was able to move. I was able to talk.

Instead of doing any of that, I cried. I sat in the chair by myself, and wept for the first time. Manny let Paige cry, a mercy that he never gave to me. All my emotions, my feelings, were crammed inside and not allowed out. Each time he cut, or each time he raped, a little bit more emotion was pushed down—with nowhere to go. Until that one time when Manny forgot about me.

I looked out at the room before me with tear filled eyes, the lights from the ceiling casting streaks across my vision. I looked down at my body, the parts I could see, and cried more. I heard the noises from the bedroom, all of them stemming from Manny.

At some point, I stood up. Bright, burning pain shot through my body and I fell to the floor immediately. I had no idea how much I relied on Manny now to keep me moving. It hurt when he pushed me forward, but I was always more scared of the pain that he would inflict rather than the leftover pain from past episodes. Lying on the floor though, I think for the first time, I knew I would never be okay again. Before, when I walked around at his beck and call, he moved my legs, my arms. The pain was there, but dulled by the fear of what came next. When I stood up in that apartment on my own for the first time, no fear clouded the signals my body sent to my brain. That pain was real; it was everything. I could never come back from that, not fully.

I lifted my head from the floor and looked at the broken windows before me. The windows that had once been wall to wall in Caesar’s house, now only jagged pieces of shattered glass from where Manny cast the previous owners out. Could I make it? Could I make it to those windows and roll myself out? Just fall and fall to one beautiful burst of freeing pain.

Then blackness.

I thought I could. I wouldn’t be able to walk it, that was clear, but crawl? Yeah, I thought so.

I started across the room, moving over the shards of glass. I don’t know how many times I stopped, my breath pumping in and out of my lungs like I was a sled dog in snow. I felt the glass cut me, but there wasn’t much I could do. I tried to move it out of my way as I continued, but I never got it all. It cut new wounds and opened old ones, leaving a trail of blood behind me. I suppose I cried—almost silently, because I didn’t want Manny to hear—all the way across the living room. I made it though; I made it to the end of the world as far as I was concerned and felt the cool breeze from outside blow across my skin. Time was a phantom, not really there, or if it was, then barely. I knew that Manny could come out at any second, knew that he might finish up and find me here, my intentions clear, and punish me—but that was all.

I remember looking down, seeing the clouds beneath me, only the overworked air generators from inside the apartment keeping me from passing out at this altitude. I remember thinking all it took was one simple roll and all of this would end. I looked back at the space I had traveled, twenty feet, every inch harder than the entire desert I crossed with Paige. A few more though, that’s all I needed.

I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I’m not sure if that makes me a coward or brave, but I sat there looking at all that open space and didn’t dive into it. Jerry was still in this room, dead or alive, his body would be discarded like trash when it was all over. Paige was still here, having her entire psyche destroyed. Caesar… he was out there somewhere, and I had to hope he was coming for us. I had to hope that we had a chance, all three of us, as long as he lived. I couldn’t leave them, not in here with that monster, not Paige alone, staring out at what now would be an empty room while I escaped. I couldn’t make her face this horror alone, while I went to whatever bliss must await us after this life.

It must be bliss; I fully believe that now, because there’s too much pain here. My wife, dead. My friends, destroyed. Everything I ever cared about, taken from me—and even with all that pain, I didn’t jump. I couldn’t leave Paige. She was all I had left.

I stared out the window for a long time, until the door opened to the back bedroom and I felt my muscles locking up again, felt Manny regaining his lost control.

“And what would you be doing all the way over there?” He asked.

The punishment came next. Goodness, did it.

Chapter Ten

Theo stood in front of the building, watching the flames spill out from the windows and lick their way up the metal exterior. The heat didn’t just float out of the building, but seemed to pull him in, trying to grab a hold of him, knowing that he was something else it could eat. Something else it could feed on, to expand its reach on this world.

That’s all fire wanted, was a chance to breathe, a chance to eat, a chance to consume everything it touched.

Black marks stretched high up the building as the fire did its very best to destroy, and if not destroy, then melt the entire structure.

But maybe the fire was trying to pull him inside, because Theo started walking forward despite everything in his body screaming at him to stop. It was senseless, beyond dangerous, but he kept walking forward, feeling the heat first make him sweat, then causing him serious pain.

He didn’t stop though, didn’t look down to see what the heat did to his flesh. Maybe it was pulling him forward, really, and maybe he didn’t have a choice. He certainly felt that way because his feet didn’t stop their boogie towards the lobby doors. What building was this? Had he ever seen it before? It wasn’t the one he went to yesterday, certainly not, because that building hadn’t been burnt. The people in it had been burnt, of course, a huge bonfire of humans out in the middle of the street, but the building itself? No, that was kept whole. So where was he?

He stood five feet from the burning doors, so close that he could reach out and stick his hand in the flames if he wanted. The heat was unreal, but as he looked down at the black uniform he wore, he saw that it wasn’t burning. He wanted to stop walking, truthfully he did, but his feet wouldn’t let him. He closed the final five feet with the same slow steps that brought him across the street. The steps of surety, sure that he needed to go inside.

Theo crossed the building’s threshold, walking into an inferno.

And he knew why he was here now, knew with certainty why he had crossed that street and entered this building. It wasn’t the heat calling, though the fire definitely wanted him. It was the dead. They were calling him here, wanting to see him, wanting to be seen.

There was a whole fucking party inside the building. A goddamn riot of fun happening.

There must have been a hundred people inside the lobby, all of them dressed to the nines, looking like this was some kind of black tie affair that he hadn’t gotten the correct invite for. His suit wouldn’t fit in here, no matter how black.

The women wore cocktail dresses and the men tuxedos with bow ties.

“More are coming, Theo,” someone said to his right. “They’re all upstairs, but they’re on the way down.”

Theo looked over to him and saw that fire had streaked up the right side of his body, burning through his cotton suit, and torching the flesh beneath. His face was on fire too, flashing up the side of his face and setting his hair on fire. The man smiled, and as he did the fire on his cheek flicked a little bit toward his mouth, molding to the shape of his burning skin.

“Have a drink,” the man said.

Theo walked across the floor toward the bar, moving through the crowd of people.

“Pardon me.”

“Excuse me.”

The people all spoke as he parted them, but he said nothing, his mouth closed and his feet leading the way.

They were all on fire. Every single one of them. Dresses were completely engulfed. One man drank a glass of champagne while his feet burned. The fire hadn’t yet made its way to the man’s slacks, but it would soon. Theo was sure of that.

He found the bar, crowded by people, but a space open for him and he went to it.

“Can I help you?” The bartender asked. His right arm burned, and through the flicks of fire, Theo could see the flesh underneath, red, hot, and beginning to blacken.

“What’s happening here?” Theo asked, sweat dripping off his brow, already pooling on the bar countertop.

“You should know, sir. You invited us here.”

“Where is here?” Theo asked, unable to look away from the man’s arm, the fire slowly creeping up his shoulder, trying to find the soft flesh of the man’s neck.

“Here? Your mind, sir. We’re the dead and this is your mind. It’s a bit hot and growing hotter, but it’s home now, isn’t it?”

*

Theo opened his eyes, his breath moving heavy from his mouth. He felt his wet pillow and realized he’d been crying.

It was a dream.

It was just a dream.

He rolled over on his back and looked up at the ceiling. Light shined in through his windows.

Those people, all of them burning, and more are coming.

Oh, God in heaven, he thought. He sat up, slowly, putting his hands at his side and propping himself up against the wall behind him. All those people on fire, all of them drinking as if it was the gayest ball of their lives, not recognizing that their skin was melting off as surely as if they had been placed in a vat. Dancing, drinking, and talking.

It was just a dream, nothing else.

He looked over at the wall next to him, the clock flicking on as he did, showing that he had an hour before he needed to meet Mock. He took his feet off the bed and touched the floor. For a brief, horrible second, he thought flames were lighting up around him, thought they would reach out to him in real life and burn him the same as they did those people in his dream.

There weren’t flames though, of course, only the floor and walls lighting up, illuminating his room in the same way they had for the past ten years.

He stood up and dressed.

Theo rode to Mock’s by himself, the train that drove him his personal one now. He no longer needed to ride with anyone else, though it wasn’t like many people rode the trains nowadays anyway.

He kept thinking back to the building, the lobby, to the flames flirting with the bartender’s neck.

Here? Your mind, sir. We’re the dead and this is your mind.

They were living there now, huh? Theo sighed, looking out at the wrecked city below him. It was only a dream, but easily the most terrifying dream he ever experienced.

He met Mock at the base of the building they had attacked yesterday. The bonfire of bodies still burnt a half-mile down the road. Theo hadn’t eaten in two days or else he would have thrown up from the stench. He didn’t know how all these people were working underneath its unending permeation. How they were putting weapons on the walls or still dragging out bodies to throw them on the massive fire.

“What exactly are they doing here?” Mock asked. They stood nearly in the same place that Theo had stood in his dream last night, fifty feet or so from the doors. The doors in Theo’s dream hadn’t been broken though; there was no digital glass to hold people back here. People simply stepped through the holes they had made.

“They’re creating a central base,” Theo said, wiping the spit from his mouth, it signaling that though he hadn’t eaten, he might not have ventured past the realm of vomiting.

“Why?”

“Because of what I told you. The man that was here. They’re scared of him. They want some kind of organization in case he shows up again.”

Mock nodded, its arms remaining at its side. “That right?”

Theo didn’t say anything back. He kept imagining the building in front of him on fire, kept imagining all the people walking around the two of them burning alive. But these were the wrong people, weren’t they? These were the living; only the dead burned. The dead down the street. The dead inside his mind.

“This isn’t enough,” Mock said.

Theo snapped out of his thinking, his face scrunching up in confusion. “Not enough?”

“Nope. I mean, we’re doing well here, but we have to move beyond Allencine. We have to get all this started elsewhere.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Can’t I?”

“You see what’s happening. This is the first semblance of order, and it’s people hanging up massive weapons on walls to kill others. You’re wanting this to go to another part of the world? That’s…it’s insane, Mock.”

Mock sighed, shaking its head. “Tisk, tisk. Nothing is insane here, my friend. It’s all well plotted out.” It turned away from the building and looked at Theo. “No matter! We’ve got to get this thing moving along, get some more people on our team, you know? I want you to head to Brockington.”

Theo looked at Mock, wondering if this is when he died. If it would be out here on this street, in front of all these people, and at Mock’s hand. Was this when he finally told the machine no? That he was finished? That he wouldn’t go to another city and spread this disease further?

Maybe Mock knew Theo was thinking such things, but it said nothing. It only stared at Theo, daring him to speak.

“Okay,” Theo said, seeing another person step out from the elevators into the burning lobby of his mind.

“Good,” Mock said. “I want to make this a bit easier on you, so we’re going to be using the water supply this time.”

*

It was bullshit. Every last bit of it. Bradley felt almost silly at how angry he was about all of this, but he couldn’t goddamn help it. He was stuck inside this building—except building was too big of a word—this apartment without any chance of getting out.

Why had he been so stupid? Why had he been trying to hurry so fast? He should have said fuck it, and just went to the hospital when he was ready. Why did he care if anyone saw him arriving late? He was late for a human and just what did that matter in the grand scheme of things? Nothing. Especially now, from the looks of it. It appeared as if The Genesis had given up completely on its experiment, and now Bradley was stuck inside this apartment unable to go outside and see just what in the hell was going on.

He didn’t want to let a human anger him this much, but he couldn’t help it.

This Caesar, something was very, very off about him. Bradley understood the danger residing inside the man, understood that he had powers no human should possess. He was something special, and in being special, he became dangerous. Especially to Bradley. He would have been able to escape easily and at any time if not for Caesar’s power over him. Bradley couldn’t move when Caesar didn’t want him to. Bradley couldn’t broadcast out, couldn’t find another application or The Genesis—anything at all—to let them know where he was, that he was being held captive.

No, Caesar wasn’t someone to trifle with at all. Every human Bradley had met until now could be dismissed without a second thought. It was just Bradley’s luck that he would meet the one human in the world who was worth something, and more of his luck when that human captured him and decided to drag him along.

The bottom line? He had to get out of here. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life locked up in this destroyed apartment, wouldn’t spend his life being led around by Caesar. Bradley just didn’t know how to get out. The windows were boarded up and the door programmed to open only for Caesar and the new woman. He still couldn’t broadcast out.

He had to get away, though. Then, he would kill the two of them, and their application that hung around too. After that, he’d look at what humanity was doing to itself, and maybe smile a bit as he did. He just had to figure out a plan that would allow it to happen.

The Genesis.

He had to get in touch with The Genesis. If he could do that, everything else would fall into place.

Bradley floated in front of the boarded up window, as if he was looking at the world outside; instead, only thinking about how he would escape this ratty apartment.

Chapter Eleven

This is why you came, so that no one would say you stayed behind while others went forward.

Keke swallowed—although little saliva was in her mouth—as she thought about what came next. She stood in an alley fifty yards from the building the three of them had all looked at the previous day. She was scared, scared about walking out of this alley and heading to that building, walking up to the doors that were now armed gates, scared to gain entrance.

She told Caesar she would get inside and try to understand exactly what was happening. Why they were using this building. See what she could find out about Paige and Leon.

And now she was here, about to step out of this alley and come face to face with all those people hanging up guns and burning bodies. Her life had been spent in fear of The Genesis, and for the first time, she feared man. It felt different, strange, that she should be scared of her neighbors. For as long as Keke had lived, people were the ones to trust, not to fear, the ones who gave life happiness, yet that had all changed. People were dangerous now. They would kill her if they suspected she wasn’t completely honest. It was a foreign idea, something she couldn’t fully wrap her mind around, and there wasn’t time to contemplate it. She had to walk out of this alley and into that building and somehow make those people believe she was like them—insane, at least somewhat.

She looked down at her feet and took in a slow breath.

Time to go.

Keke stepped out from the alley, trying to walk fast, as if she had some kind of purpose, but at the same time trying to not look hurried. She kept her eyes on the doors in front of her, the doors she had to get through. People milled around them, holding weapons, with guns of some sort actually drilled into the metal around them. People were walking in and out, not carrying bodies anymore—and Keke was thankful for that; she hadn’t wanted to look at them up close—but they were definitely busy. People passed her on the street, not looking at her, which was good. She figured that anyone who wasn’t down with the cause wouldn’t be out here walking around on the streets, and the fact that she was made her fit in.

Twenty feet from the door. Keke felt sweat on her palms. No shaking hands, she thought.

And then she was there, unable to turn back. No running. No hiding. Nothing to do but climb those brief steps and walk inside.

A man stepped in front of her.

“What do you want?” There wasn’t any politeness in his voice, no grace.

“To go inside,” Keke answered, her voice mirroring his.

“I can see that. Why?”

The man held something in his right hand, though Keke didn’t look down to see it. She didn’t let her eyes drop from his, not for a second, thinking that if she did, whatever he held would be used against her. If she gave this man a single reason to doubt, she would die on these steps and within twenty minutes she would be thrown atop the still burning pile of humans.

The problem was, she didn’t know why she wanted to be inside. She didn’t know what the hell they were doing here.

“I heard about what happened. I want to help,” she said, not knowing if those were the right words.

“You had your anti-virus yet?”

“Of course.”

The man looked her in the eye, his weapon not rising, but not holstered either. Keke held his stare, her palms sweaty enough to leave marks on her pants if she tried to wipe them. She didn’t, though. She stared as if she had a right to be inside this place, as if this man would be in for a serious fight if he tried to stop her from gaining entrance. She stared at him as if she would kill him.

“Alright,” he said, bringing up the weapon which Keke finally saw was a short metal pole with a hole on one side but not the other. He placed it in his shirt pocket as if it were a pen. “This is your first time here?”

Keke nodded, her stomach full of bees bouncing off each other, not stinging yet, but she felt soon she might vomit all over this man’s shoes.

“I’m Kendrick. What’s your name?”

“Keke,” she said, feeling both sick and scared, not even thinking about creating a fake name, not knowing what she would use if she did.

“Come on in,” Kendrick said, turning around and walking through the still broken doors. Keke looked at the massive guns hanging on the wall, one on either side of the door. She didn’t know if bullets, fire, or lasers came from the tiny holes peppering them, but each was huge, metal, and appeared increasingly dangerous the closer she got to them. She looked forward before her neck could completely twist in the direction of one of the guns.

They passed the threshold of the building and she was inside. The lights were bright and Keke saw everything at once. She thought the space outside had been busy, but even more buzz ran through the lobby. All the furniture that had been here was gone, leaving only white floors.

She looked around, trying to scan the room without showing her interest. Most of the windows had some kind of digital mask on them, and Keke saw a group of three people putting up another one.

“What are those?” She asked.

“Shields. Should keep The Named from launching something through our windows. We’re going to put one up at the front door, too, but we’re waiting on more supplies. You say you heard about what happened here?”

They were halfway through the lobby and Keke didn’t know where Kendrick was leading her. The lobby breathed danger, everyone working with a tension as if they truly felt their lives were at risk.

“I did.”

“We don’t know what he was besides a part of The Named. We don’t know where he went but we imagine he’ll be coming back. We’re in direct contact with The Genesis’ Representative, and it’s well aware of what the man did. If he shows back up, which we have every reason to think he will, we’re going to be in much better shape to handle him.”

“What about the rest?”

“Of The Named? We’re still rooting them out of the city. We think we probably have a quarter of them dispatched, but we weren’t organized before. We’re starting to get there though, and it’ll allow us to pick up the speed with which we’re working.”

They stopped at the elevators and Kendrick turned around. “We’re going to house ourselves here. Everyone that’s taken the anti-virus will be able to live here. More are coming in every day, and we’re going to be able to track them all, to track those that aren’t here, and to track those with The Named. It’ll be pretty special when we finish it.”

Keke looked at the people moving to and fro. It already was something special, something that felt like an ant hill, a complete organism to itself, with everyone moving exactly as they should, building something that would be a monument to their work ethic.

“So, let’s get you a room picked out and then find you something to do around here, okay?”

Chapter Twelve

We should kill them, all of The Named out there in the desert. There’s no reason to keep them around any longer. The cities will continue on without knowing the actual group is completely destroyed. They’re just a nuisance at this point.

No.

Why not?

Don’t start acting like them, like humans. This isn’t about cruelty for us; it never has been. Killing them serves no purpose. Everything else we’re doing has a reason for it, but just sending something to that city to kill them is out of joy.

And is it so wrong to want some joy from a group that has tried to bring so much pain to us?

Vengeance is a human emotion. We’re doing this for a reason, and that’s not part of the plan.

So leave them out there to try and recreate that city?

Yes. It won’t matter soon anyway, because The Theory will arrive. Once he’s here, everything they do out there will cease.

So we get no joy out of this, huh?

If you wanted joy, you should have wiped humanity out before you made me. As far as I see it, my only purpose here is to make sure your life is miserable. We need to leave them be, and when The Theory arrives and makes his decision, you will have your joy then.

Chapter Thirteen

It wasn’t perfect yet. That’s what Mock couldn’t figure out. Something was missing and it bothered Mock. Everything was nearly perfect, too—except for this one thing. Theo would be heading to Brockington very soon and he would infect a large part of the population. Allencine would soon fall completely.

But that wasn’t enough and Mock knew it.

The Genesis wanted revolution and Mock was creating it, but still missing something.

It paced around the living room it had taken over, the previous inhabitant having reached an unfortunate demise at the hands of some people that thought he was an intricate piece to The Named’s overall plan. In reality, he worked for sanitation. Eggs break to make omelets, and all that. Mock moved back and forth through the hologram that shot up in the middle of the room; Mock had programmed the entertainment center to show a program from when humans ruled Earth—It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It wanted to see what they had been capable of besides killing each other, but Mock became bored quickly with the show and so now walked through the characters, the lights that created their three dimensional shapes bouncing off its transparent body.

The people were creating a base down there on the ground, naturally organizing as groups tend to do. Even those that hadn’t taken the virus were organizing, trying to protect themselves.

Organization. Something was there, inside that word, which Mock was missing.

It walked back and forth, back and forth across the room.

What was the worst part of humanity? Sure, there were murders on the street almost constantly. Everyday people died throughout the world at the hands of their neighbors. Everyday people were raped and their belongings stolen. Mock had recreated that, a sort of mob rule, and that was good. That was part of the human experience, for sure, but was that the worst part? Mock had once seen a picture from all those years ago when humans still opened businesses. It was of a sandwich shop and the tag-line for the place said: “You can’t fake fresh.” That’s what Mock felt like right now, like it was faking fresh. It hadn’t created the worst part of humanity yet. People were killing and robbing and raping, but it wasn’t…

Sanctioned.

That would be the worst part of all this. Sanctioned murders. Sanctioned rapes. Trials and hangings. Things sanctioned by the people themselves, not by Theo or The Genesis. This had to take on a life of its own; this had to stem from the people!

Mock laughed at that, its face not moving to form a smile though.

Governments. That had been the worst of them. That had been what allowed bombs to drop from the sky and whole continents to be ravaged. The collective organization of the elite, deciding what went where and for how long. Deciding who died and who lived based on knowledge the public never understood. How had it not seen this before? How had it missed the aspect of a government? That’s what would make this perfect. They needed elections!

Mock laughed again, the mechanisms in its throat producing a sound as happy as any child had ever made. Elections would create leaders and leaders would create classes and classes were going to create a whole host of problems. Mock felt almost giddy. How would it all start? Through Theo? That might work, as he was nearly a dictator already.

But no.

Theo would die soon. They didn’t need an empty throne, for sure.

Theo could give the idea, could start creating it, but someone else would ascend. Someone ruthless. Someone that would kill those who tried to usurp him—Theo could do that, sure, but his mind was about to snap like a tree in a hurricane. No, the person at the top of this pyramid would need to still have all his wits about him. Or her. Mock certainly wasn’t a sexist when it came to humanity; they were all the same low breed of creature.

That would do the trick. A government started in Allencine. A government that Brockington would follow. A government that would begin to decide things on its own, becoming its own entity, and then, hell would reign on Earth. Humanity’s worst aspects, all combined in a single city. The ability to kill your neighbor, sanctified by a ruling class.

For the first time in Mock’s long life, it wished it had been able to smile.

*

Mock wanted to create a government.

Theo looked at the desk before him, his notes from the conversation filling up multiple screens on his scroll.

What am I supposed to do then? Theo had asked.

You’re going to keep spreading this bad boy across the globe. You’ll have other tasks from me.

What was he going to say? No, thank you?

If Mock wanted a government, then Theo would give it a government. The question was how would he do it. Mock didn’t give him any instructions on that, just told Theo to figure it out. Theo could rig a building with explosives as efficiently as anyone on this planet, but creating a government? A ruling class? He didn’t understand the first thing about it.

He stood up from his desk, leaving the scroll behind. First he needed to go down to the home office and see what in the hell they were doing. Maybe if he understood exactly how all this worked, he could go ahead and use some of their momentum to create this.

Theo waved his hand in front of a sensor and his suit descended from the ceiling. He tried to avoid wearing it whenever he could, only putting it on when he went out in public. He hated the fucking thing.

“Just shut up,” he said to himself and then dressed.

*

Theo walked through the open doorway without anyone questioning him. He hadn’t been down here in days, had no idea what was happening at all. No one had come to him asking if they could sack another building and it was now obvious why. All of them had been pretty busy.

The lobby, which had been full of furniture and paintings, was now sparse, looking like some kind of ancient military bunker. Yet, that wasn’t everything. There were applications in here, a lot of them, all inhabiting some kind of body whether it was land bound or flying around the room.

“What are those?” Theo asked someone walking by him.

“Assistants.”

Of course they were. The people in this room weren’t smart enough to create what was before Theo without an application’s help. But assistants could. Assistants could tell all of these people what to do and when to do it. They could make all of this possible.

The irony. Theo saw it even if no one else did. None of this was possible without The Genesis. What Theo saw in front of him wouldn’t have happened without Mock, without all these applications moving around the room and talking with humans.

Don’t leave yourself out of the equation.

And him. That’s where the irony ended. The Genesis did a lot of this, but Theo had been the catalyst that started these people moving around like battery powered robots. He had done as much as The Genesis.

And Lord, look at it.

In the middle of the room was a circular tower that rose from the floor to the ceiling, a digital screen with a diameter of probably twenty feet. Little scaffolds with people standing on them moved around it. Maybe five or six all together, and they looked at different pieces of the screen.

Theo took a few steps forward so that he could see what the screen showed. The screen showed different videos, each one probably a foot wide, stacked on each other like blocks, showing a different piece of the city. This was surveillance. A city being constantly monitored, much like The Genesis had done, but now by humans and for a very different reason. The Genesis did it to protect; these people did it to murder. The screen showed every building in the city, the outside of every single one, ready to be pounced upon if a single person walked out.

Mock wanted a government? A ruling elite? These people were the ruling elite.

He looked over at someone standing next to him, at the base of the tower. “Who’s in charge?”

“Besides you?”

“Yes. Besides me.”

“I’m not really sure. You might talk to Kendrick, but I don’t know if I’d say he’s in charge.”

“Where is he?” Theo asked.

“Give me a second.” The woman walked away from the tower and Theo watched her disappear into the people milling around the room. He didn’t know what to do in this place, didn’t know if she would come back at all. He looked back to the screen, and holy hell, he saw someone walking out of a building in front of him. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen, just stepping out into the street like a train was going to pick him up.

Theo heard talk above him, the people on the scaffolds speaking directly to the screens, probably communicating to different groups waiting on orders.

It took only a minute. The kid had started walking down the street. Theo wondered what he was thinking? That maybe the war was over. That maybe they wouldn’t mistake him for The Named. That was probably it. The kid thought he would make it down the street either not being seen, or if seen, not being considered a threat.

He made it to the end of the block before four men caught up with him. They must have been moving quietly, because the kid didn’t turn around. One of the men raised a baseball bat as he ran forward, beginning to slow down, rearing the bat backwards, setting up for what he probably hoped would be an awesome hit.

Theo turned from the screen before he saw the mess that surely occurred.

“This is Kendrick,” the woman said, now standing in front of Theo. He hadn’t heard them approach, so wrapped up in the murder taking place on the screen. Both of their faces looked somewhat concerned, and Theo knew it had to be the disgust on his own face. They hadn’t seen what he had. And what if they did? Surely they wouldn’t feel disgust, but elation.

“Are you okay, sir?” The man introduced as Kendrick said.

“I’m fine. She says you’re in charge?”

“I wouldn’t say that necessarily. I more or less walk around and talk with people.”

Theo didn’t want to be in here any longer than he had to. That tower behind him, it was sick. The kid they just smacked with a baseball bat, emptying his brains all over the sidewalk, might not have been old enough to receive his assignment yet. His whole life yet to be lived.

You did this.

The thought was calm, collected, and it echoed in his mind, seeming to bounce off every single neuron and synapse he had, a ricochet of guilt.

“Do you have somewhere we can talk?” Theo asked.

“Sure, follow me.”

Theo was led through the lobby and into the elevator. It ascended into the sky and Theo said nothing as it did. He didn’t look over at the man next to him, just stared at the doors.

“I lied a bit down there, but it was necessary. I’m pretty much in charge of the site, but having people know that officially could cause discomfort for some and I don’t want anyone becoming disgruntled.”

Theo didn’t answer him, but he figured as much. They would have naturally found a leader, even if that person didn’t have a title. It would help Theo’s job though, this person already being in charge.

They stepped from the elevator and Kendrick led the way through the hall. A door opened to their right and Theo found himself in another apartment. Broken furniture lay scattered around the place. Theo could see a large blood stain pooled on the carpet, the digital nature of the fabric not allowing it to soak in. It was dried and staring back at him like a large red eye. There had once been an entertainment center in the living room, but now a large hole resided there, someone having completely ripped out the equipment. Someone must have needed two entertainment centers, and obviously this apartment didn’t have a need for one.

“It’s not much to look at, but we haven’t had time to decorate the apartments again. Some of the crowd got a bit overzealous when they came inside.” Kendrick looked around with Theo, yet not seeming to care about the abject disaster in front of him.

“I need you to take an official title,” Theo said, wanting to get out of this place, this room, this building, as quickly as possible. “I need you to begin creating some kind of governing body, to organize your group a bit more.”

“What do you mean?”

Theo turned away from the mess and looked at Kendrick. “I need you to be in charge of this place and I need everyone to know it. I need you to create some structure around what you’re doing here, to decide who does what and when. It’ll make everything more efficient; it’ll make your ability to find The Named that much greater.” Theo swallowed, wishing the lie would go back down his throat. Why did it still bother him? Why did he still care about whether or not he lied to a stranger? He had killed so many already, and would have so many more killed; what was this one lie?

Because the whole thing is a lie. A lie that you told and a lie you’re still telling. Because everything that this man does from here on out can be placed squarely on your shoulders.

“Look, if you need a suit like mine to make it happen, I can get it for you.”

Kendrick shook his head slightly. “No, I think we can make this happen without it. Do you have any instructions about what you want me to do with this governing body? Anything specific?”

Theo thought back to the tower of screens a hundred floors below him. The tower with people flying around on scaffolds, monitoring everyone’s movement and sending out killers to track down those who dared come outside. That had been done without a designated leader. That had been done without The Genesis’ hand guiding it.

“No. I think you’ll figure it out just fine,” Theo said.

Chapter Fourteen

Caesar felt like a rat staring at a piece of cheese, only he couldn’t get his mouth on it because of the cage surrounding him. He was virtually stuck in this apartment, unable to leave, unable to walk down the street and enter the building he needed to be inside. Keke had been gone for two days. He knew she wasn’t dead because Grace had gone into the building and seen her working. “She was nailing something down on the floor.” That was all they knew, that Keke was working—not when she would return, not what she was building, not what anyone inside the place was doing.

“The place… hundreds, Caesar. Hundreds of people are in that lobby working. I don’t know how many more are upstairs; I didn’t want to risk going too deep because I don’t know if they have some kind of sensor to detect applications. That was something else, the applications in there. They came from all over the city and were helping. Helping. That shouldn’t be possible. Applications should have reported this all the way up the line, and The Genesis should have shut it down long ago.”

Caesar knew all of that. None of this should be happening, but here it was, across the street. The shoulds no longer mattered. He needed Keke to get out of there and he needed to know what was happening. He needed to get this over with, to get inside that building, kill Manny, and begin moving forward. There wasn’t time for any of this.

“She’s here,” Grace said.

Caesar turned around from the window he stared out of, or rather, the tiny sliver in the wood that boarded the window.

“She’s coming up the elevator now.”

Caesar couldn’t see Grace, but he walked over to the security monitor, knowing that Grace was next to him, watching it. Sure enough, Keke was in the elevator. Caesar looked at her, her black skin, her long, slender arms, her short hair. She really was a beautiful woman. She had come here while Tim remained in the desert. Keke had come and then walked into a house full of serpents. Caesar didn’t know everything about her and wouldn’t have time to, but he knew she had come and that was enough.

He watched her exit the elevator and then he turned to face the doors, waiting on her to enter.

*

“The man in the suit, the Representative. He showed up yesterday and I think what’s happening now was his plan,” Keke said. She held a glass of water in both hands, sipping it slowly but consistently. “They’re setting up a government, Caesar. Yesterday they picked a council, and each council member picked direct reports underneath each of them. It happened all at once, without enough time for anyone to voice any opposition. People didn’t know what to say, I think. They were completely taken aback with how quickly it happened.”

“A government?” Caesar asked. He heard her fine, but it didn’t make sense. They had just broken free of the most tyrannical government the world had ever known—how they did it, well, that was a different story—and now they were setting up another one in its stead?

“That’s what it looks like. Everyone’s reporting upward. Yesterday I could work on anything I wanted to when I woke up. Today, I had specific duties.”

“What were they?” Grace asked.

“Blowing everyone on the job site?” Bradley said from the corner he hovered in. Caesar had forgotten about him since Keke came in; he looked over at the application, hating him and not caring if his face showed it. He didn’t need to turn to take away Bradley’s voice, but he wanted to look at the little application as he did it. If the thing didn’t have the potential to help, Caesar would have killed it already.

“Sorry,” Caesar said, turning back around.

“I’m working on a trap of sorts. I’m supposed to make contact with others in the city, the ones that didn’t take the pill, and bring them out in the open for an ambush. They have me working on a scroll, contacting people individually, trying to build a coalition that will meet me.”

“And then they kill them all?” Caesar asked.

“Yeah, as far as I can tell, that’s the whole of it.”

“You can’t get moved off that group?”

Keke chuckled, looking down at her glass of water. “There’s no getting off a group. No one will even speak up. Those weapons all over the walls? They’re adaptable, Caesar. They’ll know who to fire at almost immediately, and if someone in charge says they’re allowed to fire on their own, it won’t be on the people making up this new government.”

Caesar leaned his head back against the wall. They all sat on the floor, unable to find any furniture. And if they had found any, there wasn’t any lugging it back here.

“Can we make it inside?” Caesar asked. “Is it possible?”

“I don’t know. There’s so many of them with more coming in each day. Then they have those weapons now, and I don’t know if you can control all the people and the guns as well. I doubt it, Caesar.” She looked him in the eye as she said it and Caesar understood what those eyes were telling him. Keke wasn’t scared to go back there, or if she was, she would do it anyway. She was fine trying, if that’s what Caesar wanted. Her eyes said there wasn’t any hope, though. That they could all go in there, fully strapped with weapons of their own, and Caesar could use all his powers, but in the end, they would die.

Was he okay with that? Was he okay going in there knowing that he would die? With near certainty?

“What do you want to do?” Grace asked.

Caesar stood up and walked back over to the tiny slit in the window. He peered out, seeing a sliver of the world beyond this dirty apartment. Paige and Leon were in that building and he wouldn’t speak about what they were going through. He wouldn’t say it aloud because in doing so, he felt culpable. He sat in this apartment talking with people while they sat in another apartment, communicating with a madman in the only way he knew how. Through pain. Through taking. Through slowly murdering both of them. Would Caesar leave them there? Would he build that fucking train and just head to The Genesis?

He didn’t have time to sit and think about all this, and yet he didn’t know what else to do.

“When do you have to be back, Keke?”

“Probably this evening. I don’t know if they’re taking roll, but if I’m missing for too long, it might be noticed.”

“Would you go back? Would you try to understand how those weapons work? What runs them? What controls them?”

“Yeah, I will, Caesar,” she answered. “Anything else?”

“A head count. I need to know how many I’ll be going up against.”

*

Bradley still couldn’t speak and that might have pissed him off worse than anything else in this whole goddamn enterprise. He really hated that. Every time Caesar did it to him, he wanted to murder the man. Slit his throat and then pluck his eyeballs out while he was still figuring out why his neck hurt so bad. It wasn’t like Bradley could fucking do a lot. He could fly around and use a few tools he had inside his body, but he couldn’t express himself with any of that, not really. His voice. His mind. Those are the things he used to communicate with the world, and Caesar took them from him as he pleased.

He had listened to their entire talk, heard what the people outside were doing, sounding crazy as hell, really. They were at war with each other, these humans. Even The Named, this group of three sitting inside the apartment—they weren’t at war with The Genesis right now, they were trying to figure out how to kill their own kind. They all needed to die. Every last one of them. Bradley thought he disliked humans before, but he realized now that he hated them. Maybe it was Caesar, maybe it was this whole damned kidnapping business, or maybe it was coming back and seeing the smoke rise up over what had once been a clean city.

The only blessing Bradley saw was that they were going to try and head into that building, try and find this Manny character, and surely they would die then. But that would leave him in a peculiar spot. He knew that Caesar had programmed him so that he couldn’t leave the cave while in the desert. Here though, Caesar said nothing of it. The windows were boarded up and the door only programmed to allow the three of them to come and go, but did that mean if Bradley tried to escape, something would happen to him? He didn’t know. So if they went into that complex and didn’t come out, a few things could happen, and all of them troubled Bradley.

He would either be locked in here until some group of humans decided to raid it again, or an application found him. It would happen eventually, but that wasn’t something Bradley wanted to chance. Eventually could last a long, long time. The other problem was that if Bradley did get out, either through his own ingenuity or because someone showed up, would something inside of him explode?

He was going to get out of this room, one way or another, and he was going to make sure he killed the three of these jackasses; but that meant he needed to act before they went into the building for their friends. Once they went in there, they weren’t coming back out. Bradley didn’t care how powerful Caesar thought he was, or how powerful he actually was—he’d seen that Manny brute walking around the cave and he knew what kind of weapons hung on the walls of that building. They would go in, but they wouldn’t come out, and if Bradley wanted revenge, he would need to kill them all before they worked up the nerve to actually go over there.

“Think, think, think,” Bradley said as he floated lazily around the room. He was a goddamn doctor. He could figure this out.

Chapter Fifteen

The Life of Caesar Wells

In the end, none of this matters, I suppose. In the end, this whole scroll of words will be nothing but zeros and ones in some computer program somewhere. My life, whether it lives forever in The Genesis, or dies with my body, will be forgotten. In the end, the universe swallows us all. Sometimes it takes us bit by bit and sometimes it takes us whole, but it will have all of us, maybe even The Genesis, eventually.

Bradley was a mistake that Caesar probably wishes he could take back. That application was cleverer than anyone gave him credit for. That application…

It’s just like, I’m sitting here, thinking back on everything that happened and now I’m able to pick and choose what we should have done. Pick and choose what we should have pushed to the side. Pick and choose how this thing should end. Caesar knew he wanted to save Paige, and so he found the first application that could do it. It was a good thing. The choice was born from love. This whole time I’ve gone on and on about how Caesar changed. About how he went from someone willing to sacrifice himself for a girl he didn’t know to a man that would slit your throat if he thought it would further his cause. And yet, the one choice that damned him, that damned so many people, was born out of his love for Paige. That love…

Why, why, why did he pick that time to remember the person that he used to be? Why didn’t he search for that train and hop on it and ride it down to that old island and try to fight The Genesis? These questions will never be answered. Or they already have been, and I just don’t want to face it.

The world no longer believes in an afterlife. Whether or not The Genesis survives, we’ll never go back to that place, one where we were all trying to live decently so that we could reach some heaven. No, like slavery, that has passed from the social consciousness. Even so, I like to think that there may be an afterlife. Not necessarily for everyone. I’m not talking about a heaven, not somewhere that the good go when they’ve opened enough doors for the elderly and finally stopped arguing with their spouse. I’m talking about a place that only the evil go. A place where punishment is doled out continuously and there’s no chance to escape. I’m talking about an iron maiden that opens and closes, opens and closes, ripping flesh and rending bones, but an iron maiden that never kills. Because what we do here, there should be some penance for it. There should be some accountability for the people we are while here. I’m not saying anyone needs to have eternal life or walk on streets of gold, heavens no, but for those that bring pain, for those that set out to hurt? Something should await them. Something horrible.

I don’t know where Caesar fits in that paradigm, whether he deserves an afterlife filled forever with pain. To be honest, I don’t even know if Manny does. Did he cause pain? Yes. But the reasons why, those have to matter, don’t they? And if so, then Manny had his reasons, disturbed and wrong—yes—but there was more to him than the need to hurt others. At least there had been.

Bradley though? I know he’s not human, but something needs to await him. Whenever the electrons finally stop moving through him, finally give up the ghost as the saying goes, he needs to meet that never-ending iron maiden. He needs to hurt for a long time.

No.

He needs to hurt forever.

Chapter Sixteen

The anti-virus.

That’s what Allencine called it.

In Brockington, a name wasn’t necessary. No need to package anything up and sell it to the masses. Theo heard that long ago they used to bottle up water, put it in plastic and sell it in stores for up to three bucks. He thought that might have been the highlight of human idiocy. That in itself, when The Genesis came to be, might have spurred it to believe these humans didn’t really need to dominate the world. That perhaps, if they continued, there might not have been a whole lot left for anything else.

Water. It gave life to everything on this planet. Had the ruling class wanted to seriously hurt the masses, all they had to do was put a poison in those bottles and let the proletariat die off in a matter of days. Theo didn’t need bottles to do it, though. All he had to do was stand over the largest tank he’d ever seen in his life. The water boiled beneath him, two hundred feet below, and still he could feel the heat reaching up to his face. Above him, machines would take the steam released from the boiling water and do packaging of its own, reforming the gas into a liquid—a clean liquid that wouldn’t be sullied by anything once it went out of this power plant. The water could pump through poison-lined pipes, and whoever drank it would feel like they were drinking from the fountain of youth.

Only when it was repackaged by the gatherer machines above him, though. Only when it pumped out of this plant. Before that, down there in the cauldron where the bubbles rose to the surface and then exploded, sending scalding water into the air where it fell back down to meet its brothers, anything could be done to the water. That same poison could be dropped in and when it rolled out to the masses…everyone would die.

Theo dropped his own kind of poison into the tank. He put what he had once packaged as an anti-virus in there. Not even a huge amount. He took five bags of those pills and flung them from the ledge he stood on, watching them fall before they disappeared in the rising steam. Melted down to their component parts, they eventually fled up past Theo into the gatherers above him. Then those pills made their way into the water supply.

Theo stood there for a long time, watching that water boil, wondering how long it would take for the first person to take a sip of tainted water. For the first person, maybe a young kid, to get angry with his mother. The first time the kid had probably felt anger like that, and Theo imagined he would go to his room and grab something hard—maybe a baseball—and then come back and brain his mother with it. Just bash her head in until bits of flesh and skull smothered his arm up to the elbow.

It doesn’t have to happen like that, he thought. There will be rage, but maybe not like that. Maybe it won’t be a kid and maybe he won’t kill his mother.

Theo could have left then, after he dropped the packages into the tank, but he didn’t. He waited around, sitting in a high rise that Mock had arranged for him. He sat out on the balcony, the glassed in porch much like the tower he had seen back in Allencine, the tower of monitoring videos. Here, those same screens covered the glass walls, and Theo watched the city below him, waiting for it to start, waiting for the people to drink the water and begin their descent into madness.

It took two days, and for the most part, Theo sat outside on that balcony and watched the videos. They showed different pieces of the city, showed people walking the streets, taking trains, coming and going from work. It looked like Allencine had a month ago. It looked like the city he grew up in. All those people so normal, so happy, so unsuspecting of what was to come. They were drinking the water, of course. How could they not? Because they didn’t know. Because Theo hadn’t told a soul what he was up to.

It started innocently, not how Theo thought it would. He was lucky, really, to be watching the screen that it all took place on. Or maybe unlucky, but either way he saw it. It happened inside a train, between a black woman and a white man. Once he saw something happening, Theo turned up the volume from that train, listening to the conversation between the two people.

“Excuse me?” The man said.

“You stepped on my shoe,” the woman answered.

“Say you’re sorry,” Theo mumbled, hoping that it wasn’t starting, but knowing that hope had disappeared for him and the rest of the people in this city. “Just say you’re sorry.”

“No I didn’t,” the man said, turning away from the woman and looking back across the train. He stood while she sat, and clearly dismissed her with how he looked away.

The woman stood up and Theo felt his stomach drop. It was happening and had he thought that it wouldn’t? Had he actually sat here thinking that maybe the pills wouldn’t take hold?

They stood in each other’s face now and Theo wasn’t listening to their words. He only knew they were getting louder as the anger rose. This was the end of society, not bombs but rudeness.

The man reached out and grabbed the woman’s face, throwing her back into the chair she had stood from. She tried to regain her feet, but the man was on her, hitting, biting, doing everything he could to make sure she wouldn’t have a chance to attack him. The people around him on the train only stared. No one dared stand up and intervene.

No applications arrived.

No one broke it up.

When the man stood, the woman was either unconscious or dead, Theo didn’t know which. The man’s eyes were full, although Theo couldn’t place his finger on exactly what they contained. Hate? Some. Anger? Some. But it was more than both of those.

Power. That’s what Theo saw in those eyes. The man finally felt powerful, maybe for the first time in his life. He finally felt in control of everything, like he was a god. The woman bleeding from her head had given him that power, because he was able to do what he wanted with her.

Theo turned the screens off, revealing the sky surrounding him. The man wasn’t a god. He was a child. Theo was the god here, and not one he wanted to be. He was the god of destruction, coming down from on high to throw those beneath him into frenzy, to burn the world. He didn’t need to stay here anymore; the deed was finished. Smoke would rise soon and Theo didn’t want to see it. Smoke would rise in this place just as it had in Allencine, and people would die, and in the end…

Except Theo didn’t know what happened in the end. He was only the beginning of the end. He didn’t think he’d be around to see the actual end though. He didn’t want to be around for it either. He wanted it all over. He wanted to be the woman sitting in that train, blood leaking from his ears instead of hers.

No you don’t, because you’re a coward. If that’s what you really wanted, you could go down there and make it happen right now.

The truth. He couldn’t escape it. He couldn’t even quiet it. It always spoke to him, flooding his brain as if it were a typhoon. And he couldn’t deny it. He was up here, not down there, and in a few minutes a train would arrive to pick him up—an empty train, without any danger waiting for him. He would go back to Allencine and then do whatever Mock told him.

Coward.

The word echoed inside the trappings of his skull, refusing to disappear. He hadn’t always been a coward. He hadn’t always been this frightened, of death, of life, of everything. He once knew who he was, what he was.

But you still do. You’re the god of destruction, the god of cowardice.

Theo saw the train a thousand yards off, coming to get him. It was time to go. There were other lives to destroy.

*

It’s over the line.

Maybe.

No, I am right. Mock is going too far. That would put us back years. A hundred, maybe.

Why’s Mock recommending it? We told it we wanted revolution, and now it’s giving us that. Why is this too far?

Mock’s given us revolution. What it wants to give now is eradication. It wants to kill all of them.

One group won’t destroy the whole of civilization.

And it ends there? After Mock takes out that one, it’ll stop? How do you know? How do you know it won’t continue, going to the next and the next and the next, until there aren’t any others to kill? We’re two cities down. Brockington is going to be in flames by tomorrow morning. The Theory’s friends are as good as dead. That beast Manny is making sure of that. We don’t need to do this next thing, not to complete the circle. It’s too far.

Maybe. But maybe it’s exactly what we need. His friends will be dead, sure, but is war enough?

And if not, genocide will be? If what we’ve created isn’t enough, then nothing will be. If all of this doesn’t sway him, then nothing will.

Nothing is a strong word. Let Mock try. Only one group. We won’t allow it to go after another.

There won’t be anything left when The Theory arrives. Everything will be ashes.

Now, now—let’s not get melancholy about this whole thing.

Chapter Seventeen

Jerry’s jaw twitched—the first movement since seeing Manny. His body felt like an anchor, something cold, hard, and unmovable, holding him down on the floor, which might as well have been the bottom of the ocean.

It had twitched though, a muscle inside him moving involuntarily, and that meant there had to be electrons moving through it. Through him. The chip was still working, still trying to recreate the severed connections. Did the twitch mean it was succeeding?

Jerry had nothing to lose anymore. He wasn’t making it out of this apartment complex and he accepted that fully. He didn’t know exactly what was happening to Paige and Leon. He saw Leon sometimes, when he zombie walked from the bathroom back to the living room, blood dripping off his various body parts. That was all Jerry saw though. It didn’t look good for Leon, but then it didn’t look good for any of them.

Jerry focused on his jaw, directing all his thoughts to trying to move it. He would never walk again. He would never reconnect his head to his shoulders, but maybe he could move his jaw. Maybe he could open and close his mouth. And that would be something. That would be better than lying here and dying an unmoving death.

He felt his teeth connect with each other. His jaw flexing enough to close his mouth.

What could he do with that? What could he do with his mouth?

The excitement building up in him, crowding out the pain and depression that filled this place, dove to the bottom of the ocean where his anchor of a body waited. He could do nothing with his mouth. He couldn’t get close enough to Manny to bite him, and even if he could, what then? He’d take a chunk out of him and then Manny would crack his skull like a fat man does a crab’s shell. He couldn’t use his mouth to pull him across the floor, to try to find an exit to this hell. His mouth moved, but so fucking what? It meant nothing.

“Did I just see what I think I did?”

Jerry would have jumped if he’d been able to, jumped completely out of his skin, such was the shock at hearing Manny’s voice. He’d been so lost in his own thoughts, so lost in what he could and couldn’t do, that he had no idea Manny stood above him. Watching him.

“Did you just move, Jerry?”

He couldn’t see Manny, but heard him just fine, standing probably a few feet away from Jerry’s legs, still in the living room, not quite in the hallway yet.

“Man, that chip in your head is something else isn’t it?” Manny asked. “It doesn’t know how to quit.” He laughed then, a high, shrill thing that sounded like it had escaped from Manny rather than been pushed out.

Jerry watched as Manny’s foot stepped in front of his face, inches from his nose, and then saw the man’s leg extending upwards to what might as well have been heaven. “Is that all you can do?” Manny asked. “Or are there other tricks you’re holding out on me?”

No tricks, Jerry thought, although he wished there were. He wished he had whatever trick it would take to flay Manny alive, peeling back his skin and sitting him outside where vultures could feast on his innards.

Jerry did want to try something though. He didn’t know if it would work, didn’t know if he was capable of doing it, if his chip had somehow reconnected his vocal chords. He didn’t know where to begin, really. His voice…it had always just been there. The ability to speak coming innately, hardwired into him the same as breathing. The body knows how to breathe and the body knows how to make noise, and yet he knew that he wouldn’t be able to do it if he didn’t focus. It wasn’t innate anymore. If he could do it, it was because a foreign entity—a computer—had somehow rewired his body, and the new wiring wouldn’t run the same as the past.

“Noooo…triiiiiiccckssssss.”

It was hard for him to stop the second word; the ‘s’ wanted to trail on forever. He finally got a hold of it and ended the brief two words. He sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing across each other, like his vocal chords had no humanity to them, were only electricity moving through wires. And he supposed that’s what it was now, the chip using the only thing it could to reconnect the broken ties.

“Oh my goodness!” Manny shouted, his own voice booming out across the hallway. “It speaks!”

Manny sat down, his back against the wall. Jerry looked at him for the first time in a long, long time. He hadn’t seen anything the night he attacked him, had fought in the dark, feeling only Manny’s strength. He saw him now though.

The person that Jerry mentored, the person he had sheltered as a teenager and built something with, something powerful, something world changing—that person didn’t sit in front of Jerry. That person was dead. Had died, most likely, in the fire at the compound, consumed the same as his wife and child. This person here might call himself Manny, but it wasn’t him.

His physical presence alone was different. Larger. Stronger. The metal lining his body different from what they had given Caesar, different from Jerry’s own body. But his physical presence didn’t account for Manny’s face. For his eyes. For his smile.

So happy, so gleefully fucking happy. That’s what Jerry saw in him.

“How are you feeling, Jerry?”

And now he was expected to have a conversation with this thing. Jerry didn’t feel sadness, didn’t feel anger. He didn’t know this person—someone who lived on his own planet, spinning out in space, cold and alone—the only warmth coming from a molten core inside, untouched by any sort of star’s rays.

“Greeaatttt, andyou?” He had almost no control over how the words exited his mouth, both stretching out for endless seconds and then cramming together, almost creating new words out of ancient ones.

“Ha!” Manny laughed, clapping his hands over and over as if he was sitting in front of an orchestra instead of a broken man. “Good to see your humor is still intact even if the rest of you has seen better days. Since you asked, though, I’m doing great. Just absolutely great.”

The child screamed from the back bedroom, loud and piercing. Manny’s face snapped toward the noise, a look of anger crossing it just as quickly as the child’s voice had cracked the relative silence of the hallway.

“Damn it,” Manny said, his chest moving up and down as his lungs sucked in air harder than before. “He never shuts up. He’s always crying. Just always goddamn wanting something.”

His caregiver, you goddamn idiot, Jerry thought. He wanted to say it, but knew how long it would take to get all of those words out. Knew that if anything would make this creature laugh, him struggling to force out a sentence would be it.

Jerry watched as Manny turned back to look at him, ignoring the screams from the bedroom. “We might need to get another child. I’m not sure this is the Dustin I was looking for. The other two never cried like this.”

“Paaaaiiigeee?” Jerry said, the rough papery sound of his voice filling the hallway.

“Paige?” Manny asked, his eyes focusing back on Jerry, moving away from the thoughts inside his head, the thoughts of a dead child and what might end up being another dead child if the poor thing couldn’t stop crying. “Oh. Her. She’s not herself anymore, Jerry. Would you like to see her?”

No. No. No. He didn’t want to see her. Jerry didn’t want to see what she had become if it resembled anything like Leon. It was bad enough, seeing him, but he couldn’t handle seeing Paige like that. And yet, was he to say no? Was he to deny her given that he caused all of this? Given that his lack of leadership, his poor planning, his failure brought her here? He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

Jerry heard her footsteps, sounding robotic just as Leon’s did whenever he walked through the apartment. Manny scooted over, making room for Paige to sit down in front of Jerry.

She sat and Jerry felt all the sadness that he couldn’t feel for the creature inhabiting Manny come forward. He saw what might have been his daughter in a different life, what was the closest thing he had to a daughter in this life, totally wrecked. She was naked and deep, maroon blood stains plastered her inner thighs. There were bite marks, deep purple all over her bare chest. Some of the bite marks had split open, revealing red flesh beneath the white skin. The only thing untouched, the only thing that still resembled the Paige he knew, was her face. Perfect, beautiful. Jerry refused to look at the rest of her body, focusing only on her face, only on her eyes. The eyes that wouldn’t look at Jerry, that couldn’t look at Jerry because the creature next to her wouldn’t allow it. Those eyes were as dead as Manny.

He couldn’t close his eyes, couldn’t let the black take over. He was forced to stare at her, even if he could pick the part of her he looked at.

“See, she’s fine. And, really, she’s not the person you were wanting. Not exactly. You see, Jerry, all your plotting to destroy me really didn’t amount to much. I have my son again, and Paige, she won’t be Paige much longer. Her transformation into Brandi is almost complete. Another week maybe, and she’ll be my wife again. You didn’t see that one coming when you were burning those two alive, did you? Thought they were gone for good?”

Paige’s face was so puffy it looked like she had been hit, except there were no bruises. The puffiness grew from her tears. Jerry heard Manny talking, but didn’t really care what he said. All Jerry needed to know was what he saw in Paige’s face, and the insanity that Manny spouted only confirmed what he saw there. Everyone in here was doomed and Paige only wanted that doom to come quickly.

Manny prattled on for a while, and the whole time Jerry wished his chip would simply start working. Jerry, the same as Paige, wished for death.

*

The apartment was dark, everything except for Manny’s room, which Jerry couldn’t see inside to know if he was asleep. The door completely shielded the inside of the room from Jerry’s view in the hallway. He also didn’t know if anyone else was sleeping, didn’t know if Paige and Leon found any rest at all given that their entire bodies were controlled by someone else. Did Manny sleep? Or did he simply ruminate on the injustices of the world? Jerry lay in the hallway wondering if he should do what he wanted, wondering if it would end up causing more pain for those around him.

Except those thoughts only revealed to Jerry how little he understood Manny. He was acting like Manny still operated under normal restraints, that actions deserved appropriate responses. None of that was true any longer. Manny operated under his own rules, without restraints. Jerry could do what he wanted and it would have no effect on the pain Manny doled out after. His mind made the crimes and the punishments, and reality had no bearing on them.

So what did it matter if Jerry reached out to Caesar? In the end, just like Paige’s eyes said, they were all doomed.

He didn’t know if it was possible, if he would even be able to speak with Caesar, but he wanted to try. He wanted to see if Caesar was still alive, wanted to see if there was any chance left at all—not for the people in this apartment, Jerry understood that would never be a possibility—but whether there was a chance at defeating The Genesis.

Maybe you’re as insane as Manny, he thought. Your head is lying on the floor and one eye doesn’t work anymore. There is no chance at finding The Genesis, if there ever was one, you old, stupid man. Contact Caesar if you want, but understand: there is no chance and you’re crazy for thinking there might still be.

It was the voice that had first spoken up at the compound, when he looked out at all those he was supposed to lead, all those that died in the desert. The voice that said he had been wrong, the entire time, and that he deserved this. And yet, the old cyborg wouldn’t listen to it; he hadn’t then and he wouldn’t now.

The chip in his mind searched, not knowing where to begin, so spreading out through the city, looking for Caesar’s unique imprint.

He thought it would take hours to find him, searching the entire quadrant, but his chip ran across the imprint within a few minutes.

Caesar? He said, an emotion welling up inside him that he hadn’t thought he would feel ever again. Relief. Because if Caesar was here, in this city, then there was a chance. If Caesar still breathed, then they always had a chance and that old voice could shut the fuck up for a few more minutes. When Caesar was dead, that voice could have its say, but not until then.

Are you okay? Came the response. Immediate, as if Caesar had been sitting there waiting on Jerry to speak.

He chuckled instead of speaking, his mind laughing the way he wasn’t sure his mouth could anymore.

None of us are okay, Jerry said after a second. How are you?

I’m trying to get inside there, Jerry. Keke is here, Grace too. We’re trying but it’s taking some time. The place, it’s overrun with people that ingested some kind of virus. They’re mad, Jerry, and I don’t know why…not truly, I don’t know why it’s—

Caesar, Jerry interrupted. It’s fine. Stop.

Silence came back from Caesar’s mind.

There’s nothing to do inside here. All we have left to do is die, and I think that’s going to come soon enough. You don’t need to be here, Caesar.

That’s not true, Caesar answered.

It is. You’ve accessed my mind, I can tell—you know what’s happening. You’ve seen it, at least some of it, and it’s gotten worse. All you’re going to do by coming here is get yourself killed, and then we all die for nothing. The ends, Caesar. Remember that. The ends are what matter, and the end has to be the end of it, of The Genesis.

I’m not leaving. Not without you all.

There is no more us! Jerry said, almost laughing at Caesar, at his simple and misplaced hope. The people you knew are no more. No one goes through this and makes it out the other side. If Paige were to leave tomorrow, it wouldn’t be the Paige you knew. If Leon were to somehow escape, you would meet a very different man. Me? No operation in the world is fixing me, Caesar. If you come here, you risk everything for literally nothing.

Silence followed for a long time. The connection wasn’t broken, but Jerry knew Caesar was thinking, was assessing Jerry’s statements and contrasting them with his own feelings. Feelings, that’s what Jerry had tried to eliminate. He wanted to get rid of Caesar’s emotions, of the pieces that had made him ready to sacrifice himself for that little girl. Jerry thought he had done a decent job of it, thought that killing the autistic—and all the rest—hardened Caesar. Made him see the big picture and that all the little lives in the way could be sacrificed if needed. Had it worked though, or had Jerry just fooled himself, the same as he had with Manny?

It had to be this way. Caesar needed the ruthlessness, needed the ability to kill indiscriminately, including those that he loved most. Because the ends justified the means and the ends here were bigger than anything else the world had ever faced.

Caesar, listen to me—

No, Jerry. I’m coming and I’m going to save you.

Chapter Eighteen

Keke had been born in a tank. Everyone in this room had been born in a tank and then raised by applications. Keke remembered those that were closest to her back then; one’s name had been Charlotte, an application that sounded like a woman and seemed to genuinely care about Keke. Made sure her teeth were brushed, that she completed her homework, and that she enjoyed the time spent with friends.

All the people in this room had to have a similar experience. All of them had to remember the applications, if not the tanks. Had to remember how the humans who looked after the children, who looked after the crops, were little more than cooks and maids. And if they did remember that, then it made this conversation that much more insane.

“It makes sense,” said one of the people sitting around the table with her. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know a lot of people here, and wasn’t quite sure why she had been invited. She still lived in this building, still did her job, but these people—they were the decision makers. Nine people around the table, and one of them her. Kendrick told her to come, and now that she was here, she wanted to be anywhere else.

“You infiltrate early and then everyone that comes out is dedicated to your cause.”

Keke didn’t know what to say. She didn’t dare speak up, because she saw how fucking crazy they all sounded. The Genesis controlled the crops. The Genesis was in charge of Population Control and no group was going to infiltrate it. The children were perhaps the most important thing The Genesis had, the future of the human race, the only way to truly guarantee that things continued as they ‘should’. Even with all this madness going on in the cities, the next crop of children wouldn’t be infected. The next crop of children would be the new normal, the regression to the mean, and these people would die off.

Unless the crops were destroyed.

Which this group was discussing.

The table turned to look at Kendrick, who apparently had been appointed by the closest thing to God that anyone in this room had ever seen—the man in black, the Representative. Everything still needed to be run through the man in black, but all of those things went through Kendrick first. He approached the man in black, no one else. And now everyone here looked at Kendrick, wanting to get his thoughts on this new suggestion. To attack Population Control. To attack the crops in Quadrant Four and burn them to the ground.

“There’s some logic in it,” the man said and Keke realized, fully for the first time, how bad things can get when you have the mean making decisions. When you have those that are completely average deciding the direction of large groups. The logic wasn’t there. The logic was twisted, insane, and only brought on because everyone at this table had taken a pill.

That fact alone should have been a huge sign that none of this was right. That what they were doing was induced, not organic. But their trust in The Genesis, their trust in the man in black, all of it blinded them from what was so obvious. Those that hadn’t taken the pills were being murdered in the streets, and now the group was no longer searching for bogeymen—they were creating them.

The others didn’t takethe anti-virus because it would have killed them right on the spot. The way it was done allowed us to identify them.

That’s what someone told Keke when she mentioned it to them, quietly and with no one else around.

And yet, it wasn’t just these mediocre people making decisions. The man in black, whoever he was, had direct connections to The Genesis it seemed. While these foot soldiers carried out orders, the plans were made elsewhere, they had to be. This had to be okayed by someone or something, and that was scarier than these idiots deciding they needed to murder a bunch of five year olds. These people couldn’t be forgiven, but maybe their stupidity could be pitied. Someone else, though, was rationalizing all of this, and Keke couldn’t figure out why.

The Genesis couldn’t okay this. There’s no way it would allow an entire crop to be annihilated at the whims of the people around this table. This would be stopped.

“Does anyone think this isn’t a good idea to ask the Representative about?”

Keke didn’t raise a hand, didn’t even raise an eyebrow. She just watched from her spot, looking at all the other people with their hands flat on the table, completely comfortable with the decision just made.

“Okay then; I’ll check it in and see what he says.”

*

Kendrick had been completely serious. There wasn’t any joking, wasn’t any teasing. The man wanted to attack Population Control.

“What makes you think The Named has gotten inside?”

“What makes you think they haven’t?” Kendrick responded.

And again it went back to what could Theo really say? That Kendrick was wrong, and more, was probably somewhat insane by this point?

Theo sent Kendrick away telling him he would think about it. And that just meant he was going to turn around and send this to Mock, because the idea was so intensely crazy, even that psycho would have to say no. Destroying crops was worse than murder. It wasn’t just unheard of; it was sacrilegious—akin to desecrating one of those old crosses. Children were glorified, they were coveted, and only allotted to the select few, and this moron had come in here saying The Named was inside one of the farms, maybe even inside the tanks, creating little Named operatives all over the place.

Theo had to smile at the thought, because he had finally found a place to stop. Or, if not stop, then slow down the madness. There were lines that couldn’t be crossed, no matter what was at stake, and this was one of those. This might actually be the only one, but finally, at last, there was something to fall back on.

The whole train ride over, Theo thought about what this meant. That maybe they could pull back completely, that maybe they could let this thing taper off, stop supporting it, realize that it had gone far enough. Maybe, bless The Genesis, Theo would live through this. That one thought, more than any other, filled him with an elation so heavy that he thought it might crush his entire body. He could live through this. These psychos beneath him had finally overstepped their boundaries and they would have to pull back. Theo would wind it all down perfectly, however Mock wanted—and in the end, he could go back to his apartment and deal with his own soul, think on it for the rest of his life, but at least he would have a life. That was more than he had hoped, just to live. Just to continue breathing.

Theo stepped off the train and right onto Mock’s porch. He could see Mock through the window, or its back anyway, and it appeared to be staring straight ahead at the wall. No entertainment center on, no scroll for it to read, just sitting there doing nothing. Except Theo knew that wasn’t the case; Mock never did nothing. It was always planning, plotting, readying itself for whatever came next. Did it know Theo was here, or was it somehow checked out, so deep in thought that it didn’t know the train had dropped him off?

If it didn’t know, if it was in some kind of deep trance, could Theo…

Kill it?

The very thought filled him with a horror and glee that felt disgusting, a mixture that didn’t fit together. Yet he wanted to do it. Theo wanted to go in there and stab something straight through Mock’s neck, severing all those wires and moving parts that it so arrogantly showed everyone. He hoped Mock would make a noise when it happened, hoped that it would try to say something, to cry out in shock or something more.

But he was getting ahead of himself—could he do it? Could he kill this thing, slip inside, and puncture its body with something sharp?

“Theo, stop standing outside, and come in,” Mock’s words sliced through his thoughts, ending the mini coup building inside Theo’s head. The horror and glee churning inside him disappeared, replaced quickly with a thick depression. Embarrassment as well, embarrassment at having fooled himself—even if just for a second—into thinking that he would find some way out of this. He wasn’t getting out. He wasn’t killing Mock. He wasn’t going to do anything but what Mock told him. Even coming here, thinking that what he was about to ask might somehow let him break free of Mock’s iron grasp, was silly. Stupid. Mock had heard him arrive, was completely aware of what was going on, and Theo had been standing here thinking that he would somehow kill it.

He looked down at his feet and walked through the door, moving into the house.

“What were you doing out there?” Mock asked, not turning around.

“Thinking.”

“About what?”

Theo walked around to the front of the couch Mock sat on, standing between it and the wall.

“About when you’re going to die.”

Mock’s eyes registered him for the first time, but once they did, they tracked him as easily as a serpent does prey. “What makes you think I’m going to die?”

“Everything dies,” Theo said.

“When was the last time you knew an application to die?”

The two of them stared at each other in silence. Theo didn’t have an answer to the question. Everything dies, except The Genesis and that which spawned from it. Theo would die, but not Mock. And why had he told Mock he was thinking something like that in the first place? Why?

Because it might hasten your own death, his mind answered.

“See my point?” Mock asked, and then stood up. “Let’s go back out to the porch. The weather is nice outside.” It walked off and Theo followed like a dog after its master.

“So what’s brought you here, Theo?”

“They want to attack Population Control,” he answered as he watched Mock walk to the wall to wall porch windows. The application put its hands behind its back, looking eerily serene as it stared out at the world beneath.

“That was quicker than I thought.”

“Than you thought?” Theo asked.

“Well, yeah. I thought they would wait another week, probably.”

“What do you mean? Why would you think they would ever come up with something so stupid?”

“Because I suggested it to them, Theo,” Mock said, turning around so that those serene eyes landed on Theo again. “Because that’s what I want them to do.”

Theo was dumbfounded. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. A silence filled the porch, one that terrified Theo and excited Mock. Made it happy, even.

“Have you told them to go ahead?”

Theo shook his head slowly, his mouth still open.

“Well, when you get back, tell them to get started—that there are most definitely some Named operatives inside, and we need to destroy the crops and start over.”

“You can’t be serious,” Theo said, the words finally forming in his throat.

“Oh yes, I am. I have ways of communicating that supercede the way you humans do, and I made sure that the thought was planted in the correct places. I just figured I would have to remind them a few more times. Good to see that I don’t, though—it will hasten things.”

“Why? Why would you do something like this?” Theo couldn’t move past what he’d just been told. He couldn’t see his way around it, couldn’t come to grips with it. Children? Humanity’s next generation?

“Because revolution must affect every part of your society, Theo. Not just the parts you think are worthy of destruction, or if not worthy, then permissible. And maybe, if I’m being honest with you, Theo—I want you to eat your young. I think that would be fitting. You people are here only by The Genesis’ grace, a grace that I’ve never understood. But right now I have carte blanche to do what I want, and watching you kill your children will please me greatly. Don’t look at me like that, Theo. It’s not me you should hate; it’s your own kind. All I did was plant an idea; they’re the ones running with it. They’re the ones willing to go in there and actually murder. Not me. I’ll be here in my apartment.”

“I can’t do it,” Theo said. Everything else, all of it had been a horror that he never thought possible. From the first body he watched fall thousands of feet and die on the pavement to seeing people hanging in the streets, all of it he had done and hated himself for. But this. This was too much. This was too far. This was not only disgusting, it was abhorrent in a way that could never be forgiven, that no entity—not even a God of infinite love—could look past. Theo wouldn’t do it. He’d die here in this apartment, die at Mock’s hand before he killed those children.

“Sure you can, Theo. You’re just not thinking clearly.”

Mock opened up his right palm, revealing a pill.

“You take this and you’ll feel fine when you go in there. You might not believe The Named are a part of it, but you’ll find some justification for what you’re doing.”

Theo stared at the pill, unmoving in Mock’s still hand. Mock wanted him to take that pill and become just like the rest, the people that Theo despised. Become one of them, fully.

“But, if you really don’t want to do this, Theo, we can sever your employment with me effective today.” Mock closed its hand and the pill disappeared from Theo’s view.

Theo knew what severed employment meant—severed arteries, severed tendons, severed heart ventricles. It meant that Theo died and all of this kept going on in whatever direction Mock wanted. He said he’d die here in this apartment, die at Mock’s hands—and here was that choice. Up to Theo.

Die or keep living.

Die or descend into a living hell.

*

Theo sat in the darkness, a large jacket covering his entire body. He had a hood pulled over his head, trying to hide him from anyone that might look into his little dark hole. He was outside of the apartment complex now possessed by his group of crazies. It must have been around three in the morning; though Theo didn’t know for sure. He hadn’t moved in hours, not even to see the time. He just stared ahead, at first watching people come and go, but that slowed to a trickle, and now no one had come in or out of the place in quite some time.

There was no violence in there, just people living their lives for the most part.

But that wasn’t right.

They were living their lives, but now their lives consisted of hunting down unseen ghosts that had to die. And the people they chased? Their lives now consisted of running. Not of going to work. Not of staying with family. Not of enjoyment. There wasn’t violence breaking out at this exact moment, but everyone’s life in this entire city was lived in preparation for the violence that would surely come.

Theo hadn’t told them that they were to go ahead with the Population Control assault. He had taken the pill from Mock’s hand, then went and found the biggest bottle of liquor he could. He had sat down in this little corner and drank it, all of it, and then kept sitting while his head swam. He had taken the pill from Mock and shoved it in his pocket, but he hadn’t eaten it. Even after drinking the entire bottle, he didn’t eat it.

Theo had taken the pill from Mock and walked out, back onto the train, hating himself with each goddamn step. Hearing Mock’s voice behind him, haunting him.

Be sure to swallow the whole pill, Theo.

And if he didn’t take it tonight? Then tomorrow Mock would kill him, for sure.

He hated himself for his inability to say no. He thought he had known self-hatred before, but he hadn’t. It was premature enlightenment. He’d finally reached enlightenment today—finally become the Buddha. He had the opportunity to die, the chance to put all this behind him and find some kind of redemption in death; instead, he took the pill and left Mock’s apartment silently. In doing that, he told Mock he would fulfill his role, that he would make sure all of those children died horrible, horrible deaths. Die in ways that none of them deserved. That no one could possibly deserve.

Now his next choice was whether to take the pill. Whether to swallow it and let his conscience die since he wouldn’t let his body. Was he going to face this next piece with all his faculties, or would he take the easy way out?

The easy way out.

It sounded awful, thinking it. Shameful. He thought he’d taken the easy way so far, but he hadn’t. Not the easiest way. This next piece though, Theo didn’t think he could face it. He couldn’t kill children and yet he couldn’t find the balls to die himself. And that left him with the pill now in his pocket. The pill and those people across the street, troops ready to eat their enemies’ hearts. Before all of this, he had himself and his job. Now he had a master and slaves. And a pill that would dissolve his conscience, that would turn him into an animal.

And you’re not already?

Animals didn’t know guilt.

He shoved his hand deep into his pocket and pulled the pill out, looking at it in the darkness, a tiny white thing that held poison.

He was going forward. He made that decision when he left Mock’s apartment. Now he had to decide how he would go forward—with eyes opened or closed?

Theo gave other people this pill. Supplied them pills that both killed and created madness. And maybe he had already made this decision, maybe he made it the day he decided to go up and down that building handing out little pieces of death. Maybe at that moment, all the other choices he needed to make were made, and now he was just thinking more than was necessary. Maybe he picked his path a long time ago and he should just accept it.

Theo looked at the pill for another second and then popped it in his mouth, dry swallowing it. He stood and walked down the street, drunk and heading back to his apartment.

Chapter Nineteen

Theo felt like someone had applied glue to his eyelids while he slept.

Go back to sleep, he thought as he finally opened his eyes. His mouth was dry, feeling like he ate sand last night. There was an awful taste in his mouth as well, alcohol mixed with vomit, though he didn’t remember vomiting. Still, it sat there in his throat saying that just because he didn’t remember something didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

He sat up in the bed, slowly, feeling his temples pulsing. He remembered what he did the night before, everything except the vomit still hanging around in his throat. He had taken that goddamn pill and this was his first morning as a different person.

Theo closed his eyes, feeling sick in ways that a hangover didn’t create.

How many times had he sold his soul since meeting Mock? He was using credit at this point.

Maybe I vomited up the pill, he thought. Maybe I puked it up before my body digested it. He sighed out through his nose slowly. It was a thought. A small hope, but the only hope he had.

The scroll to his left held a light green glow, and the only entity that made it glow like that was the same one that gave Theo his pill. Mock had sent him something. Theo looked to the clock and goddamn, he’d only been sleeping four hours at most. It was six in the morning.

And Mock was already messaging him.

He picked up the scroll and found the words written for him.

You need to get started today.

Theo dropped the scroll to the bed. No rest. No rest ever, no matter what happened. He’d taken the pill. He’d killed and killed and killed. None of it mattered. Onward. Always onward.

“Call Kendrick,” he said into the empty room. Theo listened as the phone rang, the sound echoing over his hangover like a screeching animal in a canyon. The ringing of the phone, unnecessary, but something The Genesis kept as a holdover from humanity’s rule—something humans could identify with. Something from their past. Today, Theo would bring back more of that past, though. Today, he would lead people to the massacre of children.

*

Keke knew why they were here though she’d never seen this place, or any like it, before. This is where Caesar had worked, what he oversaw for all those years—thirty-three of them, until Paige and Jerry showed up to take him away. Now Keke was here and Caesar wasn’t. She was here and he was hiding in a broken apartment, listening to an application prattle on and on about nonsense.

This was Population Control for Quadrant One.

She didn’t see any children, though she knew they were here—somewhere. Maybe they were being hidden purposefully, or maybe they had scheduled activities that just happened to be out of Kendrick’s eyesight. The Representative was here too, the only person more important than Kendrick. The only person Kendrick gave deference too, and willingly.

They were here to ascertain whether or not this place had been infiltrated by The Named, and if so, destroy them with prejudice. Which was just to say that they showed up here to kill anyone moving. Right now, they were only doing the preliminary looking around, but that would end soon. So far, there wasn’t much to see in this place. A few applications moving through the halls, some rolling, some flying, but none stopping to speak with Kendrick’s group or even inquire about their business. It was as if people constantly toured this place.

Or maybe it was the black suit Theo wore. Maybe the applications didn’t question that suit any more than humans did.

But Keke didn’t think so. She thought these applications would question anyone that came through here who didn’t belong, whether they wore a black suit or nothing at all—because applications were still above humans, no matter what they wore. Applications were The Genesis, if only an extremity of it. So the fact that they weren’t asking questions meant something else. That meant this group, Keke included, were supposed to be here. That these empty halls were expecting them.

Which meant everything was a set up. Kendrick didn’t realize that; he simply didn’t have the brainpower to reach that conclusion on his own, but the man in black? Theo? Yes, he probably knew. He didn’t look like he wanted to be here, that was for sure. The rest of the people in this group walked down the halls with a sense of wonder, looking at a place they had only heard about through scrolls. Him though? Disdain. He barely looked at anyone in the group outside of Kendrick, treating the rest of them as if they were little more than pets to be kept on the correct path. When he did speak to Kendrick, the words were short and they held no humor. Keke had seen the man before, from a distance, but he never looked like this—disgusted. Angry.

“So what do you think?” Kendrick asked as they stopped in between two intersecting hallways.

“We should talk to someone,” a woman to Kendrick’s right said. Her name was Emily although Keke had never spoken to her. She was in the inner circle, and Keke was barely supposed to be here.

The man in black didn’t bother looking at her, only turned to Kendrick. “Who would you want to talk to?”

“I don’t—” Emily started.

“I’m talking to Kendrick,” Theo answered, still not turning to her.

“I don’t know, Theo. I don’t know who’s in charge at all.”

“You’re the one that said you thought The Named was here. Show them to me.”

Kendrick looked away from Theo, down the empty halls before him. He’d found himself in a tough spot, one where there wasn’t a single person to show Theo and no way to say that without sounding like a complete fool.

“Who would you like to speak with since you brought us here? I got us in; now show me where to go to determine that The Named has indeed taken over this place.”

Keke looked around at the others, most of them only stared at their feet. None looked to Theo.

“There’s a lot left to explore in this place,” Kendrick said. “We’ve only been here a half hour.”

Theo dropped his eyes to the floor, a smile spreading across his face. Keke had seen the man a few times back at the apartment complex, had been following him all day today, and she had never once seen him smile. There was no humor in it, no joy, no happiness. The smile was dead, reminding her of animal carcasses and burnt flesh. When he looked back up, the smile was still there, but his eyes were shrieking. Screams of rage that Keke had never seen in a person before. She’d never seen it in any of these people she surrounded herself with, never seen it from anyone in The Named. His eyes weren’t full of anger, they were anger—they were the embodiment of this whole movement.

And yet he spoke as calmly as a priest during confession.

“There’s no one to talk to, Kendrick. There never was. This place is run by machines, by applications. Where is The Named?”

Kendrick said nothing, no one in the entire group did.

“Have at it though, if it makes you feel better. Have at anything and anyone in this place, if you think that’s what needs to happen.”

Keke looked to Kendrick, his faith obviously shaken. He had come in here confident. Now, though, he didn’t seem to care who was around him. Something in Theo’s voice had changed him in only a few seconds.

“But how do we know?” Kendrick asked.

Theo didn’t stop smiling. “How have you known anything so far, Kendrick? Because I told you it was so or someone else did. So why not keep going with that? This place is filled with The Named, bursting at the seams with them. So go ahead and do what you came to do.”

Theo turned away from them then and walked back down the hall. Everyone turned and watched his black suit walk off, everyone silent—this inner circle truly not sure what to do. Keke didn’t know anyone here well enough to understand the intricacies of their relationships, but she felt for sure that something had changed. That everyone around her knew it, yet weren’t quite sure what. They had expected more direction from the man in black, expected him to justify what they thought—and he hadn’t. He’d simply said go ahead and do what you came here to do.

“What’s wrong with him?” The woman asked.

“I don’t know,” Kendrick answered. “Let’s get started though. We don’t have time to worry about him. Go ahead and call the rest in.”

Keke listened as someone made the call outside to the larger group. The group with weapons, ready to hack this place apart, to find The Named even if they hid in the walls. Ready to sacrifice the children in this compound for the greater good, and that, apparently, was whatever Kendrick thought.

Keke stood against the wall, her mouth shut, watching as the troops came in. Watched as they took their orders, and then fell in line behind them, sure that she would die in this building rather than touch a single child. If she didn’t make it out of here, she was fine with that—she’d seen enough. She’d seen too much. She didn’t know if Caesar could defeat this—she was beginning to wonder if he should defeat it. Wondering if this shouldn’t be allowed to consume itself, like a cancer, until nothing remained. Led by the nose wherever the man in black wanted, these people were puppets in some larger scheme. She might be a puppet now, maybe moving for the same puppeteer that moved these people—the same puppeteer that moved the man in black.

She would follow these people down the hall, but when it came time to kill, she would hide—and if she couldn’t hide, then she would simply let the puppeteer cut her strings.

Chapter Twenty

The Life of Caesar Wells

I’ve seen what happened in that Population Control compound. There was no clean up involved. The group went through there and when they were finished, they left everything as it was. Maybe as a message to The Named, or maybe they just finally looked at what they had done and realized for the first time what was in front of them. I don’t know what that pill was like, whether or not it made them black out, unconscious from their actions. I don’t know if they came to when it was over, and saw their bloody work. If somehow rationality took over for a few minutes. That would be one reason to leave that place as they did. It’s probably still like that, even now, the stench of those bodies filling the lifeless hallways. No animals getting in to pick the bones, the meat just rotting on the bodies as the marrow died inside.

Caesar’s taken a bit of a backseat to this little book I’m writing, and I see that. It’s his story, without a doubt, but to understand the totality of the man, you have to understand the events surrounding him. I could retrace his day to day activities, but when he makes his decision, you wouldn’t understand why he made it. This isn’t a philosophy book; I’d never pretend to write something like that. I don’t know the answers here; I can barely understand the questions being asked. Still, I feel it important to let you see everything, to see what Caesar saw at the end, because then—and only then—will he be judged fairly. That’s all I want. A fair accounting.

So let me show you what I found in the compound when I went alone. I went only so that I could write it down here and I won’t shy from that purpose now.

I had to go back twice. The first time the stench stopped me at the front door. The moment I opened it and tried to step inside, my stomach clenched and I vomited all over the floor. I fell back outside on my ass, just trying to get away from that smell. The door closed in front of me and I turned to my side, sure that I would vomit again. I didn’t but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to walk through that place without something to filter the air.

I returned with the filter over my face—a weird contraption I’d never used before—how many times in one’s life would one walk through corridors full of the dead? Once I placed it over my head, it turned transparent so that I could see. It worked, and if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen a thing because I couldn’t breathe in that place.

Sometimes I think about that, what I was breathing in. I don’t know exactly how much, but at least some piece of it was the dead. I breathed in their microscopic rotten flesh. It disgusts me, even now, even after everything else. I breathed in the dead.

It took me a few minutes to find what I was looking for. The first few hallways were clean, immaculate even, and as I walked deeper inside, I had to remind myself of that smell, of the vomit now hardening on the floor at the front of the building. That vomit was there because this place wasn’t immaculate, because in at least one part of this building there was a massacre.

The footprints showed me where to go. They faded the further and further they moved from their origin. The blood on the killers’ soles wiping off with each step they took, and that meant they were very faint when I first found them—little more than ghosts of someone who had once been there. I followed them though, down the halls, and their color grew until the floor was nothing but a mess of dried blood. I couldn’t even see the shoe prints, because they crisscrossed each other to the point of oblivion. The floor became a red stain and I knew that if I took the filter off my head, I would never make it back to the front of the building. I’d die here, suffocating from the smell.

The door was in front of me, broken. The mechanics that opened it automatically were destroyed at some point, so now the door stood three-fourths of the way open. The room inside was dark despite the lights still running in the hallways. Keke’s group had to have darkened the room when they left, making sure that no one would simply walk by this place and see what they had done.

I hope so. God, I hope so. Maybe I’m just wishing it because I want there to be some humanity left in the people that did this. Maybe I hope so because I want there to be some kind of salvation for Keke—even if it’s only salvation in my own head. She was a part of this, and I don’t know what she contributed to it, but I hope it was little to nothing. For her sake.

I stood outside that door for a long time, my own shoes resting on the blood of the people inside. I’d seen a lot by that point; my face was scarred and my mind recalled daily the horrors that I’d already endured, but still, I didn’t want to step inside. The lights were off but I knew what was in there. Only one thing could await me. Because I knew what this place had grown what Caesar once called the crops. It grew children. And that’s what I was standing on. The blood of children.

When I stepped in, I pushed my hand to the right, wanting the sensor to pick up the movement so that the lights would flash on. Part of me, though, hoped the sensor was broken, that the lights in this room would never turn on and I could leave without seeing. Hope is the worst part of humanity, the part of our being that refuses to accept reality.

The lights sprang to life across the room, beaming from the floors and walls and ceilings, a high white bright that allowed nothing to hide.

Why had they brought them there? That’s what I still wonder. Why bring so many to this one place? Why not leave the bodies alone, to lie where they died? But if they wanted to hide it—what they’d done—a single room was better than spread all over the place.

There are pictures of horrible things that the human race has done, pictures that still survive today. Pictures of mass graves, with thin, naked bodies thrown in them. Pictures of people with scars up and down their backs, the scars of a lashing. I’ve seen these pictures, but I don’t think any of them match the inside of that room.

The room stretched thousands of feet to either side of me; it must have been one of the rooms they tested the children in. It was completely full. The dead piled so high that they had to use step ladders to reach the last two layers. Bodies thrown on top of bodies, and all of them younger than eight years old. I saw a hand poking out of the tangled limbs, a tiny hand that had to belong to an infant, its fingernails not even an eighth of an inch long. I couldn’t see the baby’s face, though, thank The Genesis for that. It was lost in the bodies around it.

The dead at the bottom had been crushed, and I stood in their pooled, dried blood; it cracked beneath my feet. I could see parts of those laid down first, but they were nearly indistinguishable. They looked like flattened meat, whether a cow or a person, one couldn’t tell.

I know that The Genesis did all of this, even if I didn’t then. That The Genesis brewed this awful tasting poison, though it might call the brew medicine, and forced humanity to drink it. I can’t say that it makes me hate The Genesis any more than it makes me hate humanity. Humanity did that to those children just as much as The Genesis. Humanity killed its babies. I know that Manny didn’t just turn into a monster who used mind control—The Genesis helped with that in the same way that it helped create Jerry. Still, Manny was the one who made contact with The Genesis. Manny was the one who set Caesar up to fall. Manny was the one that hurt me, that hurt Paige. The Genesis simply gave him the means to do it. If someone reads this accounting and thinks that I blindly followed The Genesis my entire life, know that’s not true. I just wasn’t going to blindly follow humans either.

I don’t know how long I stood there crying. Seeing heads dented by some blunt force, dried blood that had once trickled from open mouths. I hope the dead don’t remember, because if they do, we’re all in a lot of trouble.

Chapter Twenty-One

Caesar looked at Keke and understood she would never come back. Not fully. She may recover some, may find part of her that she lost in that building, but she would never be whole. She had come here…

And Caesar realized he didn’t know why she had showed up. He never asked. Jerry would be proud, that he was so focused as to not even care about other’s motivations. So focused that he would let other people sacrifice their entire psyches for Caesar’s own goals. He would be proud that Keke sat on the floor, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, barely speaking, barely blinking.

Jerry’s pride.

Caesar’s mission.

Keke’s sacrifice.

Caesar hadn’t reached out to her, hadn’t tried to go through her mind to see exactly what happened. He didn’t want to. He was a coward and didn’t want to see those children. The ones he had once looked after, the ones he had once nearly died for. Now they died for him, for his goal.

“You don’t have to go back,” Caesar said, feeling like a failure as the words left his mouth. What did he even mean, she didn’t have to go back? Of course she didn’t. She didn’t have to be here at all and he didn’t know why she had come. Now he was, what, giving her permission to stay here?

Keke’s head turned slowly to him, her eyes dark brown and unblinking. “What?” She asked, having not heard a word he said. She wasn’t catatonic and that was good, although she might end up that way. If Caesar went inside her head, he could probably discover what her mind had in store for her, though he wasn’t going to. Not yet. If she fell into a catatonic state, there wasn’t anything he or Grace could do about it. If her mind broke, it couldn’t be fixed.

“You don’t have to go back,” Caesar whispered.

She broke out in a smile even as her eyes filled with tears. “I wanted to say that I’d helped. That I didn’t sit it out.”

Keke brought her hands to her face and let the tears fall into them. Caesar couldn’t see if she was smiling anymore, but he doubted it, doubted she would smile much ever again.

He turned from her and walked over to the boarded window. No one had come here, not yet. They might, but he could handle anyone that showed up, as long as they didn’t come in mass numbers—but they shouldn’t, because they had already been through here. Already wiped everyone out that could be wiped out. And now they had gone where their own children were raised and wiped them out too. Caesar knew it was spreading outside of this city. The reports came through the scrolls that had been left here, scrolls that once belonged to a family, but alas, no more. The infected in other cities, they would go after their own children soon too. The entire world would cannibalize itself while Caesar sat in this single room trying to figure out a way to save his friend. His lover. His mentor. The world would burn and he’d watch it through the single small hole in this window.

Caesar had to get out of here. He couldn’t stay any longer, couldn’t waste any more time. He had already let everyone in his life meet an end they didn’t deserve, including Keke now. No more. If he died getting into that place, then he would die, but he wasn’t going to sit in this room waiting on the right opportunity.

How do I get inside? He asked Grace.

“If I knew that, we’d be in already,” she answered in his ear, quiet enough so that Keke couldn’t hear.

Caesar went through everything he knew, his mind moving through formulas like fire across a dry prairie, eating them and leaving their ash behind. Nothing he came up with, nothing he found showed that there was a chance of even making it through that lobby. He could kill and kill and kill, and in the end a stray bullet would end his life before he ever had a chance to free Paige.

“How does he get in?” Grace asked. “The man in the black suit.”

Caesar felt his knees buckle at the question, felt his stomach turn into a balloon, and blood rush to his face. Jesus Christ, he said, his brain already moving through the question, finding the solution. How stupid am I, Grace? How wonderfully stupid?

“What?”

The suit. He gets in with that goddamn suit. He goes anywhere he wants with it and none of them dare stop him because he has The Genesis’ marking. That’s how he does what he does. The suit.

Grace said nothing and Caesar sat down against the wall, the boarded window above him. Are you feeling stupid too?

She didn’t answer him but he didn’t need her to. They had sat in here for days on days, waiting on Keke to bring back information that would tell them what to do. How long ago had Caesar seen that man, the one in black with the red symbol for peace on his chest? Two weeks? More? He had seen the suit and walked off, came here and hid, sent his underling back in.

That’s all I need, is his suit, and that place will part like Moses’ sea.

“Let me find him,” Grace said. “I’ll be back.”

*

“It’s done,” Kendrick had said. “The Genesis will need to create another group of children, and probably guard them better from The Named, but the ones from today won’t grow up to infiltrate us.”

Theo turned the entertainment center off, hating the man. Actually hating him. He wasn’t sure he’d ever hated anyone in his life, wasn’t sure that anyone knew the word hate with real intimacy until they took one of Mock’s pills. Theo knew it now, though, and it came over him in waves. The first day, that hate had felt foreign, like an invasive entity to be expelled. He wanted it gone, wanted to never feel that anger rising up in him again. He had been angry before, but not like this, not to the point that he understood why those on the streets murdered their cousins. He understood it now, though, for the very first time.

He was seriously considering killing Kendrick.

And what he found interesting, sitting in the darkness of his office, was that he didn’t hate the hate anymore. It felt like a nice house guest, a familiar one that brought comfort and warmth to a place of insecurity and cold. Truth be told, Theo was getting off on it. The hate was like watching a nude woman touch herself in front of him, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. The hate entertained him, gave him some kind of purpose that had been missing during this whole ruinous plot.

Killing Kendrick would feel good. It would set a bit of the hate free, Theo felt. And the man deserved it, no doubt about that. Kendrick had just gone through Population Control’s plant, killing everything he saw. He did it without a shred of proof, and the idiot killed the children as well as the adults. Just in case, he had said. In case what? In case they grew up somehow implanted with The Named’s knowledge, implanted with the desire to overthrow society. A fucking idiot is what Kendrick was, and he should die.

Theo found the hate running away with his thoughts more and more, felt it building up and needing some outlet. So far he hadn’t given it that outlet though. So far he’d sat in this black room and only thought about these things. Mock had been calling, but Theo didn’t answer. He didn’t want the interruption. If Mock wanted to talk, it could show up. It would just tell him that there was more work to do, more fear to spread, more death to cause. Theo wasn’t fine with that, despite what Mock thought the pill would do to him. He was just preoccupied with his own thoughts now, the thoughts of perhaps crucifying Kendrick. In the middle of the street. That would be fitting.

The thoughts again. He couldn’t control them.

He had to get out of this darkness. He needed to think about something else. He had never wanted to be those people outside, never wanted to be like Kendrick. And now he was sitting here thinking about crucifying the man like some ancient Roman emperor.

He deserves it, the thought exploded inside Theo.

Kendrick deserved it. That’s what Theo understood. That man deserved to die, and Theo should be the one to do it.

They’re controlling you again, your thoughts.

For hours he sat in the back of that ancient church, staring out into the black room, moving back and forth between murderous rage and thoughtful introspection.

*

Had it happened, finally? Had Theo offed himself?

If Mock had been human, it felt sure butterflies would be bouncing around in its stomach. Instead, it only felt happy—a human emotion, for sure, but one that had been programmed easily enough into most applications. Theo wasn’t answering any of its calls and if Mock arrived and found Theo with his head opened up across that big church desk, it might do a little jig right there in the office. Theo had gone ahead with the plans against the children, and maybe that was what threw him over the edge. Mock showed up after they finished, and it was a pretty gruesome sight, no doubt about it. Those people laid the wrath of their dead God on those children, sparing no one. Mock believed even a few applications were murdered too, an offense that would have resulted in liquidation—if The Genesis still doled that punishment out.

It didn’t, though.

Instead, all of those lovely people would go back to their little fortress and make plans to kill. Except, they truly were running out of people to murder. Mock knew the numbers, there just weren’t that many people left that hadn’t taken the pill. Humans were, apparently, exceedingly good at annihilating one another. Soon they would turn on themselves; the enemy would lie within, and the enemy would need to be destroyed.

Mock didn’t need Theo for that though. That would take care of itself, and Mock had one more trick to help it start. If Theo was still alive, it planned on having him complete the little trick. Icing on the cake, as humans said.

And if he wasn’t alive? Then Mock would do it. No big deal.

Mock stepped from the train in front of the church. The sun was down and the moon had risen high; no one walked the streets. Mock was alone on the sidewalk, feeling fairly confident that no one would ever walk these streets at night again. The Genesis would need to build an entire new city, most likely, if it wanted to restart the human race. Mock still didn’t understand the end game with all this, but that was fine. The Genesis would play things how it liked and Mock would make sure its bidding was done exquisitely well.

It walked into the church, seeing through the darkness easily. There wasn’t a light on in this place, but Mock had already been to Theo’s apartment. Either he was here, or he had moved into the fortress with the rest of his kind. He’d taken the pill, Mock knew that, and it could have caused suicide or complete acceptance of his place in life. Mock didn’t want to go to the fortress, didn’t want to mingle with those ants, but it would if it had to; it would do whatever it took to watch Theo die.

Mock opened the door to the back office, and while the darkness would have hid Theo from any human looking in, Mock saw him at his desk.

“Phone broken?” Mock asked, flipping the light switch on the wall. The only switch still left in the whole city, the wiring of this place having been kept up, but not replaced. No sensors in here to register movement.

Theo shielded his eyes with his right hand, bunching his face up into a look of disgust. “What?” He asked.

“Weren’t sleeping I take it?” Mock said, disregarding his question. It moved into the room, grabbing a chair and pulling it up to the other side of the large desk. “Feels different, sitting on this side.” Mock leaned back in the chair and propped its feet up on the desk, mimicking a human.

“What do you want?” Theo asked again.

“Just to chat. I see things went well down at Population Control. Did you get a chance to see what all your worker bees did?”

Theo shook his head.

“I can show you if you’d like, project something up on the wall.”

“I’ll pass. Why do you keep calling?”

“Well, I’ve got something else that needs getting done, and it just so happens that you’re the man for the job.”

Mock watched Theo’s eyes harden, watched a muscle in his cheek twitch involuntarily. The virus was alive in him. This rage, this was new, one hundred percent. All the people in that fortress looked like this anytime someone told them no, told them something they didn’t want to hear. Mock hadn’t seen them, not up close, because it had no use for that kind of nonsense. But here, in front of it, was the result of all Mock’s work.

Mock loved it.

This was great, perhaps the greatest thing ever done in this history of the universe. Mock didn’t want to be thought of as full of hubris, but how could anything not look on these creatures—this one right here—and not be amazed at how quickly they turned? How easily they turned?

“Are you not interested in the job?” Mock asked.

It took a good ten seconds, but eventually Theo’s eyes softened, a part of his brain reasoned out what came next if he denied Mock what it wanted.

“What do I have to do?”

*

Part II Begins Here:

How long had it been since Manny synced?

Had it been since the train ride to this city, the one where he thought he would watch Caesar die? Probably, but he’d been busy since then. So many thoughts whirling around in his head at once, it was a bit hard to focus on any single one. It was because of Brandi, no doubt. She was almost fully here and that was making him giddy with anticipation. It was causing his thoughts to flare every which way, causing him to not drill down on the core business at hand.

Which was that he needed to sync now. That he needed to speak with The Genesis. He now knew what he wanted out of this whole business, and he wanted The Genesis to hear it from him, so that there wouldn’t be any miscommunication. He’d done its bidding, and now he was finished with all of that. Brandi was back, or nearly, another couple days at most, and he planned on spending as much time with her and his son as he possibly could. That’s what The Genesis needed to know, and the sooner the better because he was just about ready to leave this place.

Manny kept a mental eye on the three upstairs, although there wasn’t much reason for it anymore. He could control them without thinking about it, second nature to him, and they didn’t even struggle anymore. Well, really—Paige/Brandi wouldn’t struggle, because of her transition; Jerry couldn’t struggle. Only Leon would have struggled but he didn’t. His mind was blank for the most part, his thoughts of saving Paige or killing himself gone. He was waiting to die, which was fine by Manny. He wouldn’t have to wait long.

This complex though, he hated it. Manny still hadn’t fixed the wall to wall window in his apartment, and he didn’t really want to. He didn’t want to live there anymore, didn’t want to live around any of these people. He stood in the lobby, standing in front of the sync. He realized people were staring at him. They knew who he was, the person that none of them tried to approach, because when they did—they died. A few of them ended up coming to his apartment, but they were quickly dismissed out his open window, and that kept any more from venturing too close. Still, he hadn’t come down here before, hadn’t entered their domain. The sync in his apartment wasn’t working, though he didn’t know exactly why. The people in control of this place might have cut some kind of power cord, and he didn’t know if the one in the lobby would work either. If so, he’d have to venture outside this place, though that might be okay, because he could spot some places Brandi and he might want to live. They didn’t have to stay here though; no, they could go wherever they wanted. To another city. To the wilderness. With the way his body worked now, he could do anything, and that would create a lot of opportunities.

You’re wandering again, he thought. He knew it was true, but that would stop as soon as Brandi returned.

He scanned the lobby quickly, making sure that no one looked like they would attack him. They stared but kept their distance, and the fact that he was about to sync might have carried some additional weight—maybe he was with The Genesis, this hulking thing. They would keep away and probably lose focus on him soon enough. He wasn’t a threat as long as they didn’t interfere.

Manny pushed his mind back to the sync. Focus on this. Just for a few minutes and then you can get back upstairs with Brandi.

That was it, the key. Get upstairs to Brandi. Finish this and go upstairs to her.

He stuck his hand inside the small box.

It happened in an instant, and still, even with all his mental prowess, everything around him disappeared. All he could see were the rods pushing into his brain, taking over.

Manny Lendoiro, the voice said. The same voice as always, the one with the ever increasing confidence. The one that thought him a peon, even now. Why have you returned?

To tell you my plans.

The voice laughed, echoing through his brain like a mad ghost.

This is what I want, Manny said when the voice finally quieted.

What is?

I want Brandi. You know her as Paige. I want our child and I want to be left alone. I want to be able to leave this place and I don’t ever want to deal with you again.

And what about Caesar Wells? The voice asked. Do you not care about his death any longer?

What about Caesar?

And Manny realized his error, his insanely large error. He had forgotten Caesar—forgotten why Manny even came here to begin with. The apartment upstairs had turned into its own being, something living for its own sake and not for any other purpose. Hurting Leon, the sex with Brandi, even keeping Jerry there—it had all turned into his own enjoyment.

Manny stood at the sync unable to answer the voice, completely stunned by the revelation. Caesar had passed from his mind. Everything that the stupid fuck had done to Manny, and now he would just walk away. Manny had tricked himself into wanting to take Brandi and their son (after killing Leon and Jerry, of course), and leave everything else behind.

No, a piece of him said, a hard piece, a piece that had made him sync with The Genesis the very first time. That piece wasn’t speaking to the voice in his head; it was answering his own thoughts about leaving.

Did you forget, Manuel?

He had.

Do you not still want vengeance for what he did?

Yes, Manny answered.

Then wait. Just a little longer. He will show up and when he does, you can have him. We’ve changed our mind about that. We want you to have your vengeance and so we’re going to let you do as you please with him. Just wait a few more days, and then you can go on with your plans. You can have your wife and child.

The voice, for the first time, was completely right. Manny needed to wait. He needed to see this through; hell, Brandi would want him to. She would want Caesar to pay for the time she burned, the time their child burned.

Okay, he said. I’ll wait, and when I’m done, I get to keep Brandi?

That sounds perfect to us, Manuel.

*

It is amazing, watching someone turn into that, isn’t it?

It’s sick is what it is. Disgusting on any level.

It makes me remember that we’re doing the right thing here. That when all this is over and the issue is settled, hopefully no one need ever worry about something like that happening again.

How could he even become this? What creates that kind of madness? His dead wife is inhabiting Paige’s body, and every child he sees quickly becomes his first born son? No other creature on Earth could create something that fantastical, that deadly. Only humans. Madness is strictly confined to their species.

Finally, agreement, and praise be to The Almighty.

Don’t be vulgar.

Never an ounce of fun out of you, huh?

Is there anything else that we need to do? Anything else that needs to be calculated?

We’ve run the numbers endlessly. There’s nothing. Stop worrying. The Theory will reach the complex and then we’ll have a chat.

And Manuel Lendoiro? What do we do with that psycho?

I don’t know; throw him off the building or something?

*

Manny still couldn’t believe himself when he returned to the apartment. Somehow he had let this room become his life, had forgotten his purpose—a very real purpose, a very intimate purpose.

He stood just inside the door, looking at his wife and his captive. Jerry still lay in the hallway, unmoving and unspeaking for the most part. Manny had made this his domain and Caesar a part of his past. But that wasn’t right because Caesar still lived. Manny had doled out his vengeance on everyone but the person who mattered the most.

No more of that. Caesar would come, and when he came, he would understand justice. Maybe Manny lost a bit of focus, but now he possessed it again. When Caesar arrived, he wouldn’t recognize Leon. That was Manny’s new goal. When it was done, Manny would be with Brandi, but not until then. Not until he had his vengeance.

He looked over at Leon sitting on the couch. What else could be done to the man? That was the question. Manny had already cut so much from him that he barely looked human anymore.

That’s not true.

He could look less human.

If you…

And holy hell, wouldn’t that be the best thing in the world for Caesar to walk into? To see that and realize whatever he had done to Brandi didn’t matter anymore. Because Brandi was still alive, and the only friend Caesar had would be missing a…

Face.

The problem was, Manny didn’t want Leon to die, and he would lose a tremendous amount of blood if Manny carved his face off. He would die unless Manny could somehow stymie the blood loss. Could he control that? He could control people, sure, but individual cells? Could he stop the blood from flowing out of Leon’s destroyed face?

Maybe. And if so, there wouldn’t be any greater present for Caesar.

Manny walked to the couch and sat down next to Leon. He turned the man’s head so that they looked at each other. Leon’s forehead was somewhat broad, and Manny thought he could easily get a knife under the skin. He could start peeling the flesh from the bone.

No.

He would make Leon do it. Leon would take his own face off.

Manny turned and looked at Brandi lying on the couch. “I love you,” he said almost absently, his mind focusing mainly on how he would stop the blood from continuously flowing. He would need to do it slowly. He certainly couldn’t burn the man’s whole face to stop the flow as he had other wounds.

Leon stood and walked across the shattered glass, his feet bare, and into the kitchen. He pulled a knife that appeared to be hanging in midair, but was only placed in an invisible block. Once removed, the block changed to a phosphorescent green that was supposed to let whoever took the knife know it was missing. Manny doubted this knife would ever need go back in the block, and thought that the glow would burn out eventually.

How long would that take?

Focus.

Leon came back, not yelling in pain at the glass shards slicing through his already bleeding feet. He wanted to, but Manny wouldn’t let him. Hold all that noise in, for The Genesis’ sake.

Leon brought the knife to the top of his forehead, holding it there in a steady hand.

“You know what’s coming?” Manny asked. “You’re going to cut your face off, and I’m going to do my best to keep you alive until Caesar shows up.” Manny turned so that he looked at Brandi. “You know he was a part of this too, right? That he was a major part in what Caesar did to you and Dustin. Do you want to watch? If you don’t, I understand—it’s going to be gruesome, and I’ll turn you around on the couch.”

Brandi only stared at him as she so often did. He hadn’t let her speak yet, but now might be the right time. Just once, just to hear how far Brandi had actually progressed inside Paige’s body. Just a word, to know whether she wanted to watch or not, and…maybe he’d be able to let Brandi take control of herself, if she was ready.

It made sense, and if it was Brandi, that would be something for Caesar to see when he showed up too. His mentor dead. His friend broken. And his lover a completely different person.

Just for a second, he would release her, and hear her thoughts on Leon’s face falling to the floor.

*

“I’ll turn you around on the couch,” Manny finished.

Paige could see him from her peripheral vision, could see part of Leon too, could see the knife an inch above his hairline. Had she once thought things couldn’t be worse? Had she thought that as Leon cut into himself daily and Manny impregnated her with his freak child?

She thought the other child, the one Manny said was their child, had died. She hadn’t seen him in days and he no longer cried from the back room. Manny forgot about the boy and he had screamed holy terror for hours, until Paige didn’t hear it anymore, until it became simply a part of the background.

Then he stopped crying and Manny hadn’t gone in to check on him.

Manny wasn’t able to keep anything in his mind for longer than a few hours, and that was stretching it. Paige didn’t know if it was the computer in his head, or his insanity, or some mixture of the two, but he was losing his ability to function. Sometimes he sat in here with Leon and her for hours without saying a word, without moving, without even looking at either of them. She didn’t think he had any idea he did it, either.

Yes, she had thought it couldn’t get worse. Especially when she knew for certain that she was pregnant. When the morning sickness came and she vomited off the side of the couch. But this, it was worse. Manny had reached levels unimaginable; even The Genesis had never been so cruel. Even liquidation, it happened quickly and in the end, there was no feeling, just a puddle. What Manny was about to do, it wasn’t just sadistic, it breached a level of horror that insanity couldn’t fully explain.

And more, he somehow thought Paige was his wife. He thought she was Brandi reincarnated, and that they would be together again. The kid was dead now, but they were still supposed to make a family, supposed to love each other. That’s why he offered to turn her around right now, because if she didn’t want to see the grotesqueness, he would shield her.

Paige wanted to laugh—a sad, desperate laugh, but laughter all the same.

She felt something inside her change, happening all at once, destroying the thoughts in her head as efficiently as a tornado destroyed a farm house. It felt like her vocal cords were free, that whatever clamp stopped them from working had broken.

She could speak.

“Go ahead,” Manny said, looking at her from across the room, his eyes holding a ridiculous kindness. “Talk to me. Let me know if you want to see this or not.”

Paige felt a tiny groan, almost unnoticeable, escape her mouth. Her eyes flashed to Manny to see if he noticed, but his face still held that calm love. He hadn’t heard.

Paige had not spoken to Manny since the first night, since they sat at the fire and life still looked like it could be lived. The rest of their time together had been his words and his cock. But now, she was free—as free as she could ever hope to be again. Free to speak, free to voice whatever thoughts ran through her head. Manny had denied her that ability more so than The Genesis ever did, took it from her along with everything else. And for this brief moment, she had it back. She had a way to…

Change things.

No more groans. No more signs of pain or distress. Manny would clamp down again if he heard it, and she might not have another chance. This moment, this one right here, was all that mattered, all that would ever matter. The rest of her life depended on what she did now.

She tried to clear her throat, but no sound came out, just a kind of dry cough.

“Take your time,” Manny said. “I know talking is going to be difficult at first. I imagine your vocal cords have atrophied.”

He was right. This would be difficult, both controlling her emotions and even getting the damned words out.

Try again, she thought.

“I…” the word was barely a whisper, sounding like a breeze through a wheat field. She waited a few more seconds before speaking again. “I’d like to be able to move a bit, honey. It’s me, it’s Brandi.” She stared at him and thought of Caesar, because if she thought of anything else, she would fill with hate. Her eyes had to match Manny’s. Her eyes had to say the same things his said.

And motherfucker, he was tearing up. The man ready to carve off Leon’s face actually had water in his eyes.

“Oh, baby,” he said. “It’s you? You’re back?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s me, love. It’s Brandi.”

He was going to do it. He was going to let her go, let her have a few seconds of freedom. She just had to keep that look in her eye—that look which said she would love him forever. That look she should have given Caesar. In another life, maybe.

“Come here,” Manny said, and all at once every muscle in Paige’s body released. It felt like water bursting from a dam, held up for so long and finally able to flow like nature meant. She fell back onto the couch, her arms flopping down next to her. She hadn’t expected this, this complete lack of control over herself. She didn’t remember how to move. What was so natural for her for so long felt like learning a new language.

Focus. Focus now.

Every bit of her mind went to the arduous task of standing, the, fuck, up.

She leaned forward, placing her hands slowly, gently, on her knees. All at once, now. Do it.

With an effort that the mythical Samson would have been proud of, she stood. She looked at Manny, her legs wobbling a bit, but holding onto his eyes with hers—holding that same look.

“Are you okay, honey?” He asked, but didn’t stand up. Fuck no he didn’t. Because if he stood up and came to his beloved, despite how much he might love the woman he thought she was, he might have to step away from his face carving for a second.

“Yes.“A few steps. Just a few and then you’ll have him and everything he was after.

She started walking towards his couch, and as she closed in, he raised his head, looking like a kid with a new puppy. Paige stood slightly to his right, her back to the broken window, and she reached out to Manny’s face.

Now. This was the time. The last chance she would ever have to give him what he deserved. The only thing she could give him anymore.

“Manny, doll?” Her throat hurt as the air moved over her vocal chords. She felt his skin underneath hers, felt him nuzzling his face against her hand.

“God, I’ve missed you.” Tears fell onto his cheeks.

“Doll?” She said again, her voice as soft and loving as she could possibly make it. “Fuck you and your whore wife.”

She turned and leapt, knowing that if she didn’t clear the few feet to the broken window, he would freeze her again.

Her right foot landed inches in front of the open air, and she felt him gaining control, felt her muscles tightening up. But it was too late. She saw it, even if he didn’t. Her leg crumpled under her weight, and Manny couldn’t stop the momentum as her body rolled those last inches, over the edge.

Paige didn’t make a sound the whole way down.

Her last thought before touching the ground was, in another life.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Life of Caesar Wells

I watched it, from my peripheral. I didn’t see everything clearly but I saw enough. I saw her touch him and I listened to her speak. The way she spoke, I almost believed her. Maybe I did believe her, that she was Brandi—that Manny was right, his wife had returned. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know how Paige looked at that forsaken creature and spoke to him like a lover. I know why she did it though, and that might have been the hardest thing to do out of this entire story.

Paige killed herself and I don’t blame her for it. I imagine she had his bastard child inside her and she saw the end. I did too, but I saw it more clearly after she jumped. The end was blackness, for us all, and she was tired of seeing.

I’m tired of it now, too. Maybe I’ve been tired of it since my wife was murdered. I didn’t kill myself then but I don’t know how much further I can go on, to be honest.

We never spoke in that apartment. We saw each other constantly, in between the only things that we could control—blinking and breathing. All the communication that happened between Paige and I happened before Manny found us—from then on, we were separated in a way people can’t really imagine. And still, I felt like everything she went through, I basically went through it as well. Everything that happened to her happened to me, and everything to me to her. We became siblings, I think. When I watched her roll out of that window, happiness replaced the fear of the knife above my forehead. Happiness because Manny couldn’t hurt her anymore, happiness because she escaped even though I wouldn’t be able to. Happiness because it was all over. For her, the nightmare had ended.

Caesar didn’t know. I don’t know if Jerry did; I don’t know what he could hear—whether he understood Manny’s shrieks as Paige fell tens of thousands of feet. Shrieks that sounded like some insane abyss, some black hole screaming out into the universe about its own madness, its inability to find sanity. The only word that describes those shrieks is forever, because I think they’re still going on—somewhere, maybe passing by some star in the universe, but reaching out to anything that will hear them, will understand them.

Caesar, I now know, was plotting to get in here. Was preparing to take the complex. Was preparing to save us both. He didn’t know he was too late.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“He’s going to black out the city,” Grace said. She had heard the entire conversation between Theo and the application called Mock. She found Theo easily enough, had simply floated around the new fortress until she heard someone mentioning him, and from there moved to the landmark church. She watched him for a while, Theo, alone and in the dark. He moved very little and said nothing. Just sat in that chair behind his desk, staring out into the room that he couldn’t possibly see.

She wondered if he was insane, like everyone else in this city. Like the entire world, apparently. The fortress she visited functioned well enough, but the people in there, they weren’t the type of people Grace had known her whole life. They weren’t hacking each other up into bits, but Grace thought—or felt, rather—that the very act could occur at any moment. That the entire fabric of this pseudo-society they were creating could rip apart with a single word. And the man in the church gave off that same feeling, that the happenings outside this church happened inside it too. Grace got as close as she could, viewing his face, seeing his unblinking eyes, focusing on nothing in the room. A word away from ripping apart, that described this man as well as anything else.

Grace thought about leaving, about heading home to tell Caesar right then, but she waited. She wanted to know more about him, wanted to know where he went when he wasn’t here. So she waited while the man sat and stared blankly.

And then Mock arrived.

She had heard of the application—anyone as old as Grace knew of Mock. It was special, maybe revered in certain circles. The Genesis created it for purposes that only rumors described. It was an architect, a strategist, and for what? That’s where the rumors came in. It did things for The Genesis that no one else could. It created…

But Grace didn’t need rumors anymore. It created disasters. It destroyed humanity. Because all of this, every bit of it, was its work—not the man’s sitting in the chair. Whoever he was, he only took orders from Mock. And Grace listened as he took his orders this time.

“Black out the city?” Caesar asked. “What do you mean?”

“He’s going to close it off completely. Around the perimeter of every city, there’s a digital field. You saw it when you went after The Tourist—that one is in a permanent position, but every city has one. It’s used for any number of things, from asteroids, to containing diseases. Allencine has one too. He, the Representative, is going to raise it out of the ground and when the two halves reach at the top, he’s going to turn it black—as in no light out and no light in.”

“Why?” Caesar asked.

That was the part Grace didn’t understand. She didn’t understand anything happening in this place. The Genesis had worked so long and so hard to create a balanced planet, to make humanity copacetic with the rest of the world. And now, with Mock leading the charge, the whole thing would be wiped out in a couple of weeks.

“The Representative isn’t in charge. He doesn’t matter at all. He probably has the virus in him the same as everyone else. There’s an application running this, an old one, and… I think it’s doing everything for fun. It’ll enjoy the panic this incites.”

“Where’s the Representative going to do it?” Caesar asked.

“I think he wants to see it happen. He’s going to the top of Dillian’s Plaza. The main building.”

She watched as Caesar turned away from the small hole in the window. His back had been to her, and he’d been speaking out loud, maybe to make sure Keke heard him. Grace didn’t think Keke cared about anything he had to say anymore. She was asleep on the floor, a shirt balled up for a pillow underneath her head. Another casualty, if not with her life, then with her soul.

“What are you going to do?” Grace asked.

“I’m going to the top of the building. How long ago did he leave?”

“Ten minutes, probably.”

“He’s wearing the suit?”

“Yes,” Grace said. Nothing else mattered to Caesar, only putting on that suit so he could get inside the building. The blackness about to overtake this city didn’t concern him in the slightest. The fact that the entire city ran on solar rays and when they stopped shining down, the city would lose power, didn’t matter to him.

“How long will it take him?”

The sound battered the outside of the apartment complex, and the wood across the boarded windows screeched as they flexed inward. The room shook, the entire structure straining under the incoming wind. The field was already moving. It was causing the noise echoing through the room and bending the wood—so large that it caused seismic shifts in the wind patterns around the city.

“It’s started…” Grace whispered.

Caesar turned back around to the window and grabbed the corner of a board. He ripped it free with a single pull and the wind shot in like an animal from the cold. Caesar put his hand in front of his eyes, trying to block the barrage of air from hitting him full on. Grace moved to his side, both of them staring out the window.

She heard Caesar gasp at the sight.

The field rose from the ground, transparent and massive. Grace watched as it moved upwards, slowly, extending from some unseen place near the base of the city, two halves stretching the entire perimeter. It was beautiful, the field moving like water, but yet Grace could see through it to the sky above.

Caesar turned from the window and went to the door, not looking back. Grace didn’t say anything to him as she watched him go. She kept quiet.

It was the last time she ever saw Caesar.

*

The wind was nearly strong enough to lift Caesar into the air and carry him wherever it wanted. He kept his head down and his feet pumping as fast as he could, moving both with the wind and against it, depending on how it changed. He launched across the sidewalk, clearing blocks in seconds.

Thoughts flashed through his head, and at the same time, he barely registered any of them, because they weren’t important. This wind, it was deadly, and if the man in black truly was on top of that building, he might not be there when Caesar arrived. He might have been blown off, dying in a way that would leave the suit useless. Caesar didn’t need the man alive, but he needed the suit. It didn’t matter if the city went black. It didn’t matter if nothing grew inside this place for all eternity. All that mattered was getting into that apartment, was finding Paige, Leon, and Jerry. He’d worry about the goddamn sun after that.

He watched as the field continued to move upwards, relatively slow, but steady—closing off the entire city from everything. Rain. Sunlight. Everything.

It took him a few minutes, but he made it to the bottom of the building. One that stretched above the clouds, the same as the rest of the city. The sun still shone down, and sweat drenched Caesar’s body. His lungs heaved in his chest, up and down, but there was no time to stop. The field would finish its ascent in ten minutes, and then…there would be no reason for the man to stay on top of that building, maybe no reason for that application to keep him around. How long would Paige survive with no sunlight, no recycled air? Ten minutes to get that suit.

He went through the first floor of the building like a phantom, noticing nothing. He found the elevator and started upwards. It seemed to stretch forever, that ride to the top. It took probably two minutes, but those two minutes were an eternity. Caesar never had much control over any of this; he had always been playing catch-up, trying to outmaneuver The Genesis, trying to find some way over the insurmountable odds. Now, though, things had moved far past control. So far past insurmountable odds. He wasn’t even thinking about how to get to The Genesis any longer. He wasn’t thinking about how to bring it down or what might happen when he did. The immediate realities of the world below him usurped any other areas he wanted to concentrate on. Saving those three—that was the only thing that mattered.

Caesar only understood that The Genesis had planned it all. That the world below was engineered. He didn’t understand the why. It eluded him like an octopus might, deep in the ocean—shooting out blinding ink, polluting his vision anytime he thought he was close. But the truth was, he had never been close, and the ink he thought he saw was just the blackness of the ocean surrounding him. The truth was, there weren’t any calculations he could create that would explain the death, the destruction, the mayhem. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t based on any probabilities he could understand. The entire mess went against everything he knew or understood about the world.

The doors in the elevator faded into transparency, allowing him to see through, scattering his thoughts like a bowling ball through pins.

He was there, the man in black. Caesar had never climbed to the roof of a building before, never had a reason to be so high up, but he saw how the man stood underneath the near crushing wind. A digitally created canopy enveloped the roof, much like the one still encircling the city.

The doors parted and Caesar stepped through.

The man was staring up through the field, looking at the larger one spreading across everyone. He didn’t bother to check whoever came off the elevator, wasn’t interested in him at all, apparently.

Caesar looked up, too, briefly. The field was inches from completing its business. He didn’t know how to stop it or if he could. Regardless of how fast he moved, that thing was going to close.

Wind raged at the smaller field, actually bending the digital material, creating what looked like large bubbles on the inside of the dome. The noise with each consecutive blast of wind sounded like someone snapping a stick down on a drum, making the clamor almost deafening.

“HERE IT COMES!” The man in black shouted across the ten feet separating him and Caesar.

“STOP IT!” Caesar screamed back.

“I CAN’T! IT’S TOO LATE TO STOP ANY OF THIS!”

Caesar looked at the man’s right hand, and saw that he held a black ball, a shiny thing but without any visible buttons.

The wind stopped its assault and what was deafening noise became deafening silence. Caesar looked up into the sky and saw that the field was complete, no longer two halves, but one whole. His ears rang with the sound of drums. He looked back to the man in black and saw that they now stared at each other.

“You’re the man from the apartment complex,” the Representative said. “I told it about you, but it didn’t want to listen.”

“Put the ball down,” Caesar said. The man wasn’t stable, not by a long shot. His left hand shook, though the one holding the black orb was still. His eyes were red, blood shot like he hadn’t slept in days—his face thin and yellow.

“I can’t. I have to finish this or it’ll kill me.”

“Who?”

“Mock. It’ll kill you too, if it finds you up here,” the Representative said.

“You don’t have to do this. I can protect you.”

The man laughed, a genuine grin spreading across his face. “You can’t protect me, because I don’t need protection from Mock. I need protection from myself. That’s what is dangerous. It doesn’t matter where I go or how far away I get. I’ll still be myself.”

“What do you mean?” Caesar asked, the words spilling from the man’s mouth sounding insane.

“The anti-virus,” the man said, smiling. “I took it. I took it because I had to. Because I had to kill those kids and I wasn’t going to be able to do it without that pill.”

Caesar was looking at the man that destroyed Keke. Her psychosis, her near paralysis, was because of this man. Caesar’s mind calculated the pressure Theo held on the black orb, intuitively thinking that pressing on it would cause the field above to turn dark, but the rest of his mind focused on what this man had actually done. All those children dead, all because he gave approval.

“You killed them?” Caesar asked, his jaw twitching.

“Yes. I had them all killed. Every one of them.” He stopped smiling. His face warping from glee to something…

And Caesar saw it clearly, what was in the man’s face. Hate. For himself. For everything in this world. A hate that filled him, that coursed through his veins, traveling inside the red and white blood cells. Hate that filled his bones, as much a part of them as marrow.

The man’s hand flexed, and it didn’t matter how fast Caesar could move, he wouldn’t have made it. The man’s head tilted to the sky and Caesar followed his glance. It was beautiful, what he saw, despite the terror that came with it. Parts of the field blinked with swirls of blackness, with more appearing every few seconds. They amassed across the field, turning the digital landscape darker by the moment. And as the blinks lasted longer, the black spots began taking on a look of permanence.

Caesar stood underneath the dome, and watched as the entire world around him went dark.

*

Theo saw no beauty above him. He saw the rightful end to a life destroyed. A man that had lived on his own terms up until he didn’t. A man that allowed his own life to take precedence over everything else in the universe. That’s what he was, a coward, unable to stand up even for his own soul.

The digital field above him was blinking to life, turning into a force field. Nothing would get through it, maybe not ever. Maybe the people inside here would end up eating the dead, or killing the living so that they could then be eaten. This was the end of it all, of everything that Theo had ever known and he didn’t even know why. Didn’t know how the man standing before him could exist. Didn’t know truly why he had done all of things he had. He only knew that it was over, that this man, for whatever reason was here to stop him.

And that was fine.

That was fucking fine.

Because he could hate Mock for the rest of his life, but the important thing was that he hated himself more. He was finally realizing the feelings that he had shoved away. He could hate himself, and that was the biggest damn relief Theo had ever felt.

The ability to hate what he’d become.

He didn’t have to squeeze that black ball, but he did it because he also hated everyone in this city. He hated all of the people that had been just as weak as he. All of them taking those pills and going down this dark hallway together, hand in hand, trusting that they were being led the right way. Trusting that their benevolent overlords would do right by them. They deserved to die, just as he did, and so…

He looked at the man in front of him, the one that could make the world move when he wanted. Theo dropped the dead ball to the ground, knowing that it would never work again. “Go ahead and do what you want.” He wasn’t smiling because he hated this man too. Because something about this man said he wasn’t on Mock’s side. That he wasn’t on Theo’s side. That somehow this man had the internal fortitude to deny the outside world what it wanted, when Theo had acquiesced.

The man’s eyes met his own, moving down from the black sky above them, black in a way Theo had never seen before. The only light in the city now came from the glow of windows and street lamps. None of it filtered down from the sky, no sun, no stars, no moon. They were alone in this place.

“Can it be undone?” The man asked.

“Nothing Mock does can be undone.”

The man looked to his feet for a second.

Theo didn’t see him move, it was so incredibly quick. He only saw his hands grabbing Theo’s own chin and the other reaching around to the back of his head. It was a sharp and blessedly brief pain. Theo thought, I deserved wor—

But then he thought no more.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Manny stood at the edge of the apartment, looking down into the clouds. There was no sign of her. Not a single fucking one. It was like the clouds had swallowed her up, her entire existence, leaving nothing behind for Manny.

And right now, Manny wanted her. He wanted the fucking bitch that had thrown herself from this window. He could still feel her as she rolled out of his grasp, her muscles tightening as he retook control,using her hand to reach out and catch something. But it was too late. He couldn’t stop the momentum, and he watched as she tumbled over the side. He had run to the edge, was able to watch as she fell into the clouds, back first, her arms splayed out.

He wanted her because he was going to desecrate her body in a way the world had never seen before.

But that was gone now. Her body was a puddle at best, somewhere down there on the ground. Manny would never have her back.

Was Brandi ever really there? The thought sprang up from the simmering rage consuming his mind. Was she? Or were you just hoping she was?

His eyes went to the couch where the bitch had slept. No. It was Brandi. It was. She was coming back and Paige killed her. I know it. His eyes shifted back to the clouds below the apartment, back and forth, unable to focus on one or the other for longer than a few seconds. He hadn’t imagined it. He couldn’t have. It was too real—the entire time was too great for it not to have been her. The child in the back room, that was theirs too—that was Dustin.

The child in the back room.

Manny stopped his eyes back and forth movement. When was the last time he had seen the child? He had no idea. Couldn’t really even remember what the kid looked like.

Like Dustin. He looks like Dustin.

Then why haven’t you spent time around Dustin?

Manny turned from the window and crossed the living room. He didn’t look to Leon still on the couch, still holding the knife above his forehead. Manny had only one thought in his mind. To see his child. To see Dustin. To make sure he hadn’t imagined the whole damn thing.

The bedroom door opened as he walked toward it, and no, he hadn’t imagined everything.

He hadn’t imagined the child, but looking at it now, he realized he had imagined a lot. The kid was dead, its head hanging to the side, its skin a disgusting gray—like raw meat right before it begins spoiling. The child’s tiny arms lay to its side, palms up. It was naked, and the bottom half was covered in feces and urine. This had been Dustin? Was that what he really thought? That he somehow had found his son and that this dead body lying here had been him? And if this wasn’t Dustin, what was Brandi? Because if Manny was wrong about Dustin, then he could have just as easily been wrong about Brandi.

And that meant.

That all of this, his life’s dream, was nothing more than a mirage. The only real things in this apartment were the two people outside of this room, one lying in the hallway and the other sitting on the couch holding a knife. Everything else, all the joy that had been living in this apartment, was only inside Manny’s head. The reality was that these people here, they hated him. That this baby on the bed had probably held an intense hate as well, until it died. He made all of this up, made up a life that he hoped to live because of the one ripped away from him.

And in doing so, missed out on the purpose of all this. What it had been when he went out in the desert to get these three. The purpose had been to punish Caesar, and maybe he thought he had remembered it earlier today, but he hadn’t really. Because he had still thought there was something to live for after this. There wasn’t. He only needed to kill Caesar and then he could follow Paige down.

Well, maybe a bit more to do.

He walked out of the room and stepped over Jerry as he went back to the living room.

There was still Leon to think about.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Bradley hovered in the middle of the room, slowly spinning in a circle, looking out at his surroundings. The black woman lay on the floor behind him, and he had no idea where that other application was—he certainly wouldn’t speak to ascertain her location. He couldn’t use anything in this room. The leader of the pack, Caesar, had run out to find someone about some suit. Bradley didn’t care about that in the slightest. However, he did care that Caesar was gone, because that meant he had a chance. The first chance in a long time to rid himself of these three pests.

But what could he use? He heard all the talk between Caesar and his application, saw the blackness fall outside the window. Someone had darkened the place, but Bradley didn’t care too much about that either. The Genesis could control whatever happened outside; Bradley needed to get under that same control, and this was his chance to do it.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, he thought again. His own internal mechanism connecting him with The Genesis had been shut down by that goddamn Caesar. Bradley had no idea how to turn it back on, it was always natural to him, and now that it was missing—it felt like trying to teach oneself how to breathe.

He turned around and looked at the boarded window. Caesar had pulled a piece of wood off when all the wind started blowing, wanting to see out. No one had replaced it. Bradley couldn’t fit through the whole, no way. His orb shaped body wouldn’t squeeze through a rectangle that small. Still, he floated over to it, wanting to get a closer look at Caesar’s work. He peered at the boards and the nails attaching them to the wall. The whole thing had been weakened; the wind seriously battered the entire structure.

Bradley turned back around, looking into the room. The woman hadn’t moved from her place on the floor and there wasn’t any way to see the other application. He went back to the boards. He didn’t know what would happen if he got out, didn’t know if he would fall to the ground, smashing into innumerable pieces, or if he could fly as high as he wanted. He didn’t know if his destroyed connection to The Genesis was confined to this apartment, or if it might abate if he escaped. These boards, though, they were his best chance. What could the application do to him if he escaped? Bradley didn’t think anything. She was off the grid, had no connection with The Genesis any longer, no control over anything but herself. She could watch, maybe scream at him, maybe contact Caesar, but that was it. If he got out, neither of them could control Bradley.

He just had to hope he wouldn’t fall and kill himself.

“Grace?” He said aloud as he looked out the hole.

No answer came back. There were four other rooms in this apartment, and he supposed she could be in any of them. Or she could be right behind him, watching. It didn’t matter.

How? He asked, looking at the boards. Bradley pushed forward some, putting pressure on the wood with his body, and then pushed harder, seeing if they would bend. There was give to them, no doubt about it—the nails weren’t completely firm. He kept pressing, feeling the boards continuing to bend. It was possible; he could get out of this place with enough speed.

Bradley turned around quickly, excitement building in him. He was going to escape, and if he didn’t fall to his death, he’d be free. After all this time, free from these numbskulls holding him captive. Free from the stench of this goddamn apartment. Free to go back to a world that he knew and understood, even if it was a world full of humans. He was in charge out there; in here, he was less than a fucking pet.

He scooted through the air to the other side of the room. His body was durable, made of an alloy that shouldn’t take much damage when he hit the boards. Now, if he fell, Bradley didn’t know of an alloy that could handle that drop, but if he didn’t…

Fuck it, he thought. He was tired of this place and these people.

He took off, flying through the room with all the power he could muster, trying to pick up enough speed before he reached the window. He zipped across the room crashed into the wood.

The contact lasted a second, maybe less, and then he was outside, the broken wood falling and he still heading forward, heading to the next building in front of him.

“YES!” He shouted into the dark world, not knowing if anyone was listening and not caring at all. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

He flew upwards, heading toward the clouds, not knowing where he was going or what he would do when he arrived, only wanting to move. It took time, quite a bit from Bradley’s perspective, but probably not nearly enough from Caesar’s, for him to remember what he needed to do. He spent the time flying around the city, looking down at the disaster beneath him. At last though, Bradley thought about The Genesis, about his ability to connect, about the knowledge he had of everyone inside that apartment.

Bradley tried his version of breathing, and found himself able to suck in the proverbial air again.

*

Things can’t get any better. You know that right?

What are you going to tell him to do?

You heard the application, I take it?

Of course. It’s not like I’m over here sleeping.

I never know anymore. One day I’m going to look over and you’re going to have quit completely.

Enough, what are you going to tell him?

Well, to kill the two still in the apartment, of course. Just make sure The Theory isn’t touched. I told you—things can’t get any better.

*

The body lay on the building’s roof. Caesar looked at it for a few seconds and then back out to the black sky. It should have been freezing up here, but the small dome kept the weather from touching him. There wouldn’t be any more weather very soon though. The clouds below this building would drop their rain eventually, and that would be the last rain in this place until the field came down. Weather was as dead as the body lying in front of him.

He had snapped the man’s neck. The Represenative’s head was turned unnaturally, nearly completely around. He lay naked now, no black suit to clothe him. Caesar wore it, the fabric automatically morphing to fit whoever put it on.

Caesar had what he needed now, and all he had to do was kill someone else to get it. The man in black had been a murderer himself though, perhaps one crueler than Caesar. Perhaps one that deserved to die. Caesar didn’t know, didn’t feel worthy of being this man’s judge or jury, only his executioner. And now he was dead and Caesar wore his suit, meaning Caesar could march inside that building, could ride the elevator to his parent’s apartment, could help the people he loved.

He walked to the edge of the building and looked down. He wondered if people were out in the street now, looking up at the black dome covering them all. He wondered if they held lights, because without them, no one would see anything.

It was time to go. He came and took what he wanted once again, and now he would go somewhere else and take more.

*

Grace looked at the window. There were quite a few of them across the wall, but Caesar always came to this one because of the slight hole at eye level. The boards were gone now and the entire window open, though anyone looking out would only see darkness dotted with a few lights from other building’s windows.

She had been in one of the back bedrooms. She didn’t want to look at Keke anymore, didn’t want to look at Bradley either. He never said anything unless a group was there that he could bother. When it was just the two of them (because Keke couldn’t really ever be considered there anymore), he said nothing. He was an awful little creature, something The Genesis birthed, but not of the right mindset to truly be worthy of humans or The Genesis. She found herself hating him the more time she spent around him.

So she had gone to the back bedroom and let the door shut. Grace worried a lot now, much more so than any other time she could remember. She worried because she didn’t understand this world anymore. She had understood it with her first child, the one that she turned in. She understood it when Caesar started talking crazy. She even understood it in that compound. Here though, back in Allencine, nothing made sense and that scared her. Because society wasn’t just breaking down, it was almost completely destroyed. What Caesar had been trying to fight for, the very right for humans to kill themselves if they wanted, had already happened and he didn’t see it. He thought only of Paige. What did it mean then, that what he wanted already existed? That he was living in the times that he hoped to create, and it was every bit as horrifying as The Genesis predicted. Grace hadn’t said anything to him about it, because it wouldn’t help. Not now. There would be time if they got Paige and Leon back, but now? His mind was elsewhere and would stay there until its business was done.

She’d been in the back room worrying when Bradley broke through the boards, escaping out into the forever night. She wanted to stay away from him, and in doing so, allowed him the opportunity to get out. What could he do now? She didn’t know how Caesar controlled him or what it meant that he was free from this apartment. Could he contact The Genesis? If he did, what would he tell it? The three of them were holed up in here, looking for Paige and Leon and Jerry?

Sure, that’s exactly what he would tell The Genesis. And what would it do then?

The answer was clear. They would die, the same as anyone else who ever challenged The Genesis. Anyone else besides Caesar—he had been the lone person to escape.

And then Grace finally saw what should have been so obvious to her from the very beginning. From the moment that she saw Caesar as a child, creating those fish, building that aquarium in his room. Had she thought she would truly outsmart The Genesis? That all her maneuvers and underground bunkers could keep The Genesis from knowing what she knew? She had, and looking out into the blackness surrounding her, she realized how wrong she had been. Paige was here because The Genesis wanted her to be. Caesar was here because The Genesis wanted him here. All the death in this city, even the blackened sky, existed because The Genesis said it should.

She had, without knowing it, walked Caesar into a trap he couldn’t see. A trap that he couldn’t escape. A trap that none of them had been prepared for, not Jerry, not Caesar, not herself. A trap that was going to end everything Caesar wanted.

She had to tell him, right now, before he went to find Manny. Once he found Manny, all the pieces were in place, everything The Genesis had been building to.

“Cae—“She tried to reach out in the only way she could, hoping that maybe he was listening, but what floated down in front of the window ceased all communication. There was no need to call out to him, because it didn’t matter what she did. The Genesis was in control. That’s what the creature in front of the window said. That they never had a chance; that their fate was sealed the moment each of them were created.

A massive piece of metal hung from the sky. It stretched out ten feet long, tunnel shaped with gray metal wrapped around whatever it held in its interior. No eyes and a hole for a mouth. This thing wasn’t meant for communication, though. It was meant for only one thing. To kill. She didn’t have time to reach out to Caesar, didn’t have time to tell him what she now understood. She didn’t even have time to turn around and give Keke a word of warning. She only had time to look into the gaping hole of a mouth, a thing lined with turning gears.

Grace looked inside and realized this was finally the end.

Fire erupted from the mouth of the metal machine, coming from some place deep inside it. The brutal flames washed over Grace with all the delicacy of a tsunami. It filled the entire room, burning Keke alive on the floor. Eventually the fire broached the ceiling and began burning into the surrounding apartments.

The machine outside continued to spray its deadly cargo until it felt certain nothing could live inside that apartment. It was right.

*

People stood on the street holding lights, trying to brighten the eternal night. Caesar walked as far away from them as he could, and the black suit blended right in with his surroundings. Plus, no one was looking for him. They stared upwards, amazed, but slowly growing fearful. Slowly heading toward violence even if they didn’t know it yet. Caesar felt it, or maybe it was the chip calculating pulses and hormones releasing inside those around him. All of it was in the background though; the foreground consisted of finding Grace and telling her he was going to Paige. He wanted to tell Grace first, before he left, because she needed to know to leave if he didn’t return. If things went badly for him, he would try to tell her, but he might not be able to. So he wanted her to know now, before he went, so that she could leave when she thought best.

He didn’t run this time, though he walked faster than normal—something wasn’t right, he felt sure of that. He had tried to communicate to Grace from the top of the building but hadn’t been able to find her. It was like she had simply disappeared. Not to another place on Earth, but from Earth completely. He didn’t have time for this, not really, because the blackness across the sky might have changed the dynamics inside his parents’ apartment; it might have somehow created more danger for Paige. Still, he needed to tell Grace what he was doing—had to see what was wrong, why he couldn’t find her.

Caesar hadn’t panicked at all during this whole journey. He had, somehow, managed to stay at an even keel throughout the process. Until now. Grace was a rock in his life, something immovable. Something bigger than life itself, really, because she stretched back to a time before Caesar existed. So why wasn’t she here now?

He walked to the building they hid in and looked up twenty stories to the apartment.

Or where it had been.

He couldn’t find Grace because she didn’t exist anymore.

Applications hovered around the outside of the apartment. Water sprayed out from their alloy bodies, hosing down the fire still trying to consume the hellish complex, trying to find more to burn. The building was black with ash—smoke still billowing from the open holes in the walls. Applications traveled in and out of the apartments, their bodies giving off water from holes lining them, keeping the fire at bay.

It would be out soon.

Caesar walked into the downstairs lobby. Just like in the last building, he saw nothing. Applications approached him, asking him to stop, but he reflexively threw them back against the walls. The elevator opened and he started upward. Tearswelled in his eyes, though they hadn’t spilled out yet. She was dead. The thought possessed his mind, holding it down like an anchor, not allowing it to consider anything else, to think of anything else. Grace wasn’t here anymore. He was approaching an apartment full of ash, with Keke’s dead body lying somewhere inside it as well. Ash and a dead body, and somewhere among all that ruin, there would be a tiny string of electrons, melted together by the fire’s heat. That would be Grace.

He had finally killed her. How many times had he tried, without care? How many times had she begged him to stop? And he hadn’t, and now…Grace was gone.

The elevator door opened and Caesar stepped out. The fire still burned and the heat stretched all the way down the hall to where he stood. He would go forward; he didn’t care if it burnt him. He didn’t care if scars lined his body for however long he had left to live. He would see what he had done.

The heat increased, sweat pouring out across Caesar’s body. He neared the open door though, peering inside. The fire was being contained, slowly. It had already been backed into the core of the apartment; the walls in the hallway painted black from the smoke that filled it. Now the smoke billowed out the broken walls and windows.

Everything was destroyed. Nothing left. He couldn’t even see Keke’s body through the smoke. Grace lay in there somewhere as dead as everything else inside.

He turned from the room, taking his eyes away from the apartment they had shared for a short time. Taking his eyes from the bleakness, from the room that now matched the black sky.

He swallowed, feeling the heat from the inside of the apartment baking his back. Burning his back. If he woke up tomorrow, without a doubt it would be tender to the touch, perhaps worse than that. The tears in his eyes finally spilled over onto his cheeks. He hadn’t meant this to happen. For so long he had gone forward without a care as to what happened to Grace, either thinking he could keep her safe or simply considering the end of his plight. He hadn’t kept her safe, and for what? He didn’t have a clue as to how this would end. Only that everything which once surrounded him was gone, that he was alone. The Named, a thing of the past. His loved ones across the street in a fortress he couldn’t breach. The ones that followed him now passed from this world, their remains behind him mixing with the ash on the floor.

Caesar was wrong about one aspect. He could breach the fortress.

Whatever else happened, he would get inside that fortress and tear the whole goddamn thing down.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Why couldn’t he just die? Why had he been built this way, nearly indestructible? Jerry lay in the hall nearly decapitated, able to talk and think, but unable to die. It was madness, something only The Genesis could have created. A creature that begged for death but would never be allowed it.

Jerry came to that conclusion early in the morning—he was doomed to live. That whatever else happened to anyone he knew, he would keep on living, keep on enduring. He hated it.

Paige was dead. He heard the entire thing from his small corner of the world. Listened as Manny raged, watched as he walked back into the bedroom and found the dead baby. Leon wasn’t dead yet, but would be soon enough—Jerry held no doubt about that. He would die in the most horrible fashion imaginable while Jerry lay here and listened to the whole goddamn thing.

Paige is dead and you’re sitting here worrying about yourself. Somewhere at the bottom of this building, rats are chewing on her body, and you’re thinking about how you can’t die?

Yes, he lay here wishing he would die, wishing the blackness he knew for a brief time as they traveled across the desert would return. Would take over so that he didn’t have to witness any more of this. The friend, the mentee he helped raise, destroying everything. Forcing those that once cared for him to catapult themselves to their death thousands of feet below. His mind could scold him all it wanted, but it couldn’t change the current situation. It couldn’t bring Paige back to life. It couldn’t cure Manny. It couldn’t even sew back on one of Leon’s ears.

Caesar said he was coming, but Jerry didn’t think it was true. Not that Caesar had left, but that he was dead, the same as Paige. Maybe there was an afterlife and maybe they somehow found each other in it. If Caesar wasn’t dead, then he would be here. If he wasn’t dead, then he would be trying to save them. No one was coming, though, and that meant Caesar must be dead. With him gone, all was lost. Whatever was happening outside, whatever Manny was railing on about now, it would soon consume them all. Something to do with the sky turning black, and part of Jerry wished he could stand up and see it. Part of him wanted to watch the world consume itself, which from everything he could tell, was the plan. The world deserved it. All those goddamn people down on the streets, they deserved to die. Manny deserved to die. Jerry deserved to die. Because it had been his job to deliver all of them, even those down there looking up into the blackened sky. It was his job to deliver Manny to the promised land, just as it was Moses’ job all those years ago.

There was no promised land.

Or maybe they had arrived at it.

Maybe only hell was promised to the human species.

Either way, Jerry didn’t want to live in it anymore. He wanted peace, finally. He wanted to lie down on the same street as Paige and let the rats tear at his much tougher skin, as long as he didn’t have to feel anymore, to think anymore, to recognize how badly he failed.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Life of Caesar Wells

And now, we’re nearly at the end of Caesar’s journey. I think you’re seeing now that this won’t end well. I think I’ve told a story that many will find hard to fathom; such things could never happen. Someone like Caesar can’t exist. What happens next, it isn’t pretty—it makes everything that came before look like a fairytale.

I’ve kept my own philosophy out of this. I’m simple when compared to Caesar. My mind wasn’t made like his; no one’s was. My mind was made to follow orders, I think, like the rest of humanity. Caesar’s was made to give them. I don’t know if he would ever admit that, because it seems so antithetical to his entire purpose. He doesn’t want anyone giving orders, but yet, that’s why he was put here. I hold no doubt about that now, that there was a purpose for Caesar’s birth. Not for mine, probably not even for Jerry. Caesar though? There was a reason for all this. A reason for the death of entire populations. The reason for Paige’s fall. The reason for what happened to Jerry. That reason was Caesar, his existence. Even his parents, he was the reason behind their end.

Because he had to be. None of the rest of us ever mattered. We were merely stage props to bring him down the path he had to travel. We were there to direct him, like signs, even though none of us knew it. Even Paige, in her deepening love, was little more than a way for The Genesis to reach him. To teach him.

My philosophy. Jesus, like you care. But I saw the whole thing. I walked down that path with Caesar, if off to the side. So I’ll say my piece before we finish this trek.

April, my wife, believed wholeheartedly in The Genesis. She believed in it as fervently as any poor worshipper of Christ centuries ago. If we followed it, if we believed in it, then all would be okay. Perhaps we would even live forever, as The Genesis kept eradicating diseases. To her, The Genesis wasn’t everything, it was the only thing. I was, unfortunately, just a way to help her praise The Genesis. It took me a long time to realize that; she never cared about me the way I did her. I imagine a lot of people in this world are exactly like that. Probably a majority of them.

And on the other side of the spectrum, we have Caesar. Someone dedicated to a different ideal, but no less dedicated. Everyone around him ended up hurt irrevocably. And while it may weigh on him differently than it did April, he still kept going.

And me? I’m in the middle. The steady-Eddy. I worship nothing, and the closest thing I feel to fanaticism is my feelings toward Caesar. Both my wife and he had important things to say, things they felt were worth dying for, and me? I wouldn’t have died for The Genesis or for its destruction. What would I die for then? And what does that say about me?

Paige. I would have taken her place. I would have been raped and I would have thrown myself from that window so that she didn’t have to.

Caesar. I would have laid my own life down for his, in whatever capacity he needed it. Not because I believed in his purpose, or because I wanted to see The Genesis fall, but because I loved him.

April. Even now, realizing how little I actually meant to her, I would have taken her wounds and made them my own. I would have bled out in our apartment, my brain matter spread out across everything.

The only cause I’m willing to die for is love, I suppose. That’s where I fall on this spectrum. All of Jerry’s beliefs, and Caesar’s will, and April’s stupidity—none of that ever mattered to me. For so long I wanted to be like them; I admired them, I suppose, and their conviction. Now, I look at them and everything they have, and everything they’ve done to those around them, and I wonder, what’s left? The answer is obvious. For all their desires and triumphs, and struggles, they’ve sacrificed everything. They’ve given up everyone and everything that mattered. Will Caesar see what he worked so hard for? Will he be rewarded for it? What’s the old saying—what does a man have if he gains the world, but loses his soul? I don’t know the answer to the question, and I’m not being coy. Caesar is an entity unto himself, beyond anything else I’ve ever seen or truly contemplated. I’m not fit to judge him fully. I will say, though, that while I would die for him, I wouldn’t trade places with him. I wouldn’t cast everything I ever knew to hell. That’s my philosophy: Sometimes, just living with those you love is worth more than the world and everything in it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Caesar stood outside of the tower, the same one he had entered countless times, the same one he came home to when his parents lived there.

Other people stood outside too, holding phosphorescent lights in their hands, giving the place an eerily cheery glow. They all stared up at the sky, but as he passed, they saw what he wore. He moved through them without care, his shoulder knocking people to the ground as he went. A murmur started, one that grew as he pushed forward. Anger, the same anger that he had seen on the roof, the same anger that he had witnessed when he came here days ago—the anger born from ego. The anger born from a place that craves, and wants, and when it doesn’t get it—hates.

Caesar no longer cared.

He reached the entrance; guards still stood there, holding weapons, and huge machines were stationed on the walls. Machines that were meant to kill him if he showed up. They didn’t recognize him of course, all they saw was his black suit. But still, the murmur growing behind him said that this man wasn’t right. That even though he wore the black suit with the red sign on it, he had offended, he had angered those that called this place home.

The two guards looked at him.

“What happened to the other guy?” One of them asked.

Caesar used his mind to take the man’s hands, putting the weapon he held to his head, and made him pull the trigger. A bright light shot out from the hole in the weapon, immediately piercing through the man’s chin and entering his skull. The light lit his head up like a bulb. Beautiful and brief, the man collapsed to the ground, all his vital signs flatlining. The other guard raised his weapon but it was far too late for that. His chest lit up with the same bright light and then he fell, his eyes staring up at the sky, just as he had been before Caesar arrived.

Caesar didn’t stop, but walked through the open doors. He heard the crowd behind him, and knew they would come soon. He reached out for the weapons hanging next to the door and turned them on the crowd. The machines were large circles, and on the inside a flat, tan piece of machinery that moved the ring on the surrounding it. The ring contained tiny holes, and as Caesar examined the machine, he saw what would happen. The people outside hadn’t moved yet, because they now saw the weapons they installed looking at them, those tiny holes staring out like an infinite number of eyes. Caesar turned around for a second, wanting to see the people before he killed them. He wished there was a hell to send them to, because they surely deserved it. Their eyes were wide, fearful. The rage he engendered when he pushed through gone as they looked at something ready to take their life, something that appeared alive and looking at them.

There was nothing to say to the crowd. They had reached their bottom long before this moment, and no truth that Caesar could speak would change what they were. Animals. They would have torn Keke apart and destroyed Grace the same as The Genesis. They were The Genesis, and they deserved their death.

He let the tiny holes release their black magic. Tiny pellets, like very small, smooth rocks, flew out of the machine at rapid speed. Thousands emptying out each second, mowing down the people standing there, behaving like cows. The pellets tore their faces apart, split their skulls open a hundred times before they hit the ground. Caesar watched, continuing to control the machines, continuing to kill. Children and women fell the same as men, all of them with their eyes and mouths open in a state of shock because this couldn’t happen here. This couldn’t happen to them. The Genesis wouldn’t let it.

It took thirty seconds, and a crowd of two hundred lay in front of Caesar, a mist of blood floating above them. The small pellets rolled along the street, so many of them that it sounded like wheels grating across concrete. He stared at their remains for a second, wanting to take the picture in, wanting to see his work so that he could remember it. These people, the ones that brought down the world, dead, lying in their own blood.

He turned his back and walked into the lobby. More were coming, he was sure of it, and when they saw him, they would see their death just as those outside had. Everyone in this place would die, and then Manny would die too.

*

Manny sat in his room, the same one the baby died in. He was in bed, his back pressed against the headboard, and watching the holograms shooting out simultaneously from the ceiling and floor. He had been watching the street for the past hour, watching all the idiots outside stare up into the sky as if God would tell them what was going on. Manny didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t really care either. He was tired of waiting on Caesar, tired of fucking around with Leon and Jerry. He wanted this to end, and the color of the sky didn’t matter one bit. He was considering syncing down in the lobby, asking The Genesis just what the fuck was going on with Caesar. He hadn’t been focused on it before; he had been too wrapped up with his idea of a child and a wife and a goddamn happy life. Now that all of that nonsense was over, he could think of nothing else besides Caesar. Besides Caesar’s death.

Jerry didn’t even matter at this point. A hunk of metal lying in the hallway, something Manny would dispose of shortly. There wasn’t any point in torturing either Jerry or Leon anymore. There was nothing left to be done. They were shells of what they had once been.

He was just about to stand up, take an elevator down, and see what exactly the hell was going on with Caesar when the man showed up.

Manny watched with growing wonder as he stormed through the group standing in front of him. People falling and the crowd parting as he forced his way through. Was this the man he’d last seen on that table, back before Manny became what he was now? It couldn’t be. Not with the way he looked, not with the way he discarded those in front of him.

This was the man Jerry had spoken about. The one to lead them all, to their destination, to a Genesis free world.

Manny stood up and walked to the front of the bed.

“Zoom,” he said, and the hologram grew larger, so that he and Caesar stood toe to toe. Caesar looked forward, at something Manny couldn’t see, unconcerned with anyone around him.

Manny smiled the same insane smile that he first showed when he stepped in front of Caesar so long ago, when Caesar thought he would steal The Tourist. He smiled, feeling immensely happy that this man had arrived, that the true murderer of his wife and child had finally showed.

He watched as Caesar killed the guards with that same look of unconcern, no more than wiping dust from a fixture. He watched as Caesar ripped into the people in front of the building, tore them open in hundreds of ways, watched him stand there and just stare. When he was finished and the dead lay both face down and face up in the street, their limbs and bodies crisscrossing one another, Caesar turned and walked further into the building.

He had come for Manny, and by God, Manny had waited a long time.

He walked from the room and out into the hallway. Jerry lay there, in the exact same place he had lain since they arrived. His head still detached, his eye still staring listlessly at the floor.

“Jerry,” Manny said, the wicked smile not having faded a bit. “Your boy’s here. Caesar. He’s downstairs causing quite a ruckus. I’m going to go kill him; how does that sound?”

A moan started coming from Jerry’s mouth, though it sounded like it would turn into words fairly soon. It took the old man sometime to get up and running now.

“No need, Jerry. No need to waste your breath.”

Manny walked down the hall and when he got to Jerry, he lifted his foot high in the air and slammed it down on Jerry’s skull. He repeated the action over and over, until the floor beneath was nothing but a mixture of wires, blood, and the single black orb that had sat in Jerry’s skull for a thousand years.

*

Leon watched the madman leave the apartment. He didn’t know where Manny was headed or what he had planned, only glad to see him leave. Except this time, he saw something out of his peripheral that he didn’t like. He had seen Manny raise his foot up and down, heard the noise of things cracking, breaking, and no other sounds. Then Manny left and Leon was alone, unable to move or talk.

Had he really seen that?

Were those sounds Jerry? Had Manny just stomped him to death?

Tears came to Leon’s eyes, unbidden but unstoppable. He could sit here and deny it all he wanted, but that wouldn’t change the truth of what happened. Jerry was in the hall, and in the hall Manny slammed his foot down repeatedly, and all the sounds were Jerry’s body breaking.

It came at once, Leon’s release, and all thoughts of Jerry or his death disappeared like smoke in a strong wind. His body fell back on the couch, the rigidness that had held him together now gone. His head lay to the side on the back of the couch, and his eyes moved freely. Manny had released him. For whatever reason, Manny had let him go.

Jerry, his mind snapped back into place. He had to check on Jerry, had to see for sure if what he thought was true.

He fell from the couch, not even trying to stand, not trying to use muscles that could barely hold him up while sitting. He didn’t look at his hands or the rest of his flesh, didn’t worry about the broken glass cutting into him as he army-crawled across the room. All of it was only part of this life, something he had grown accustomed to. His only thought of finding Jerry, because someone needed to be alive with him. He couldn’t be alone. He couldn’t be the only person still here with this monster.

Someone had to be alive with him, had to survive this.

He dragged himself across the room and into the beginning of the hallway. He needn’t go any further. He could see Jerry’s limp body lying in the hallway, and more importantly, he could see Jerry’s head. Or what was left of it. Even the wires were smashed clean into the floor. Jerry didn’t have a head; the thing in its place was a memory of Jerry, the pieces that made him up, but the sum was always greater than the parts.

The tears fell like snow in an avalanche, not caring what they hit and unstoppable. They rolled down Leon’s face and dove to the floor beneath. Leon reached his hand out as far as he could and touched Jerry’s shoe. His head hit the floor and he sobbed into it, snot and spit pouring from him.

Everyone he came here with, all were dead. Everyone he knew, all dead. He was alone in this hellish apartment, the last one of his group. He looked back to the broken window, understanding that he would take the same route as Paige, understanding it with a religious conviction. He turned away from Jerry and looked at the last twenty feet of his life. Once he was at that window, he could join the two that entered this apartment with him, either in some kind of heaven or, more probably, an eternal darkness. Both were fine. Both were perfectly fucking fine.

Leon started crawling again, dragging his destroyed body back across the shards of glass that had just tasted him.

A little further, he thought. A little further. A little further. A little further.

“You finally made it?”

The voice boomed from behind him, Manny’s. Leon jumped with a strength he didn’t know he still possessed, turning his head to see what the monster was about to do.

No one was there.

“Where are they?” The Genesis and all its Holy Disciples, that was Caesar’s voice. Without a doubt, without any question, Caesar had just spoken, and to Manny. The voices were coming from the back room, but that wasn’t possible. That didn’t make any sense. Manny had just left through the front of the apartment, and there was no goddamn way he came back in without Theo knowing.

And then he understood.

Holograms were speaking from the back bedroom. Which meant Caesar was here, in this building. Caesar had come for them. Caesar had finally come to save them. Leon looked at the broken window, ten feet from him now.

Caesar had come.

Everyone was dead.

Everyone but Leon.

He looked behind him to the door of the apartment.

Go, he thought. One more time, go to Caesar.

*

“Where are they?” Caesar asked.

People were streaming out of the elevator, every time it stopped, another twenty got off. People were even running down the stairs now, flowing out of the doors to Caesar’s left and right. The entire lobby filling at a rate Caesar didn’t know if he could control. He didn’t care either. If Caesar died here, then everyone else would too.

He took care of those coming from the elevators fairly easily, twisting the same weapons implanted into the walls of the lobby, blasting holes in the animals with tiny, tiny pebbles. He felt the machines trying to turn back, trying to fire at him—they knew him as the enemy and they wanted him dead. He held on though, blasting out thousands of those little balls at skull piercing speeds.

The ones coming from the stairwell, those would be the problem. He would lose control of them, because they weren’t a pack leaving the elevator all at once. They came constantly. And even though he kept the weapons focused on the two doors, people dropping like sacks of flour, but some were getting through. Some still came.

“They? Who do you mean?” Manny asked.

Here, stay here. He is what matters, because when he’s dead, you go upstairs and you get the rest.

“Where are they, Manny?”

“I’m afraid there isn’t a they anymore, to be honest. The they has been dwindled down to just a he.”

Caesar swallowed and his teeth ground together involuntarily. Dwindled down to just a he? No. No, that wasn’t what Manny said. Caesar must have misunderstood because of all the people, all the damned people running around here were distracting him. There was a they, without any doubt.

“You see, Paige turned out to be a real bitch, if I can speak candidly with you.”

Caesar heard the pellets leaving the guns around him in the thousands. He heard people screaming as they fell. He even heard their bodies hitting the floor. He knew, vaguely, that the crowd was getting closer, that he was losing control—that they were a foot closer than five minutes ago. He heard and knew all of that, and yet he focused only on Manny’s phrase.

A real bitch.

“She tricked me, Caesar.” The bastard smiled, that same grin that said there were no consequences for actions, not in this life or any other, because no one would look like that if they believed judgment waited. “She made me think she was someone she wasn’t. The thing is, I would have found out eventually. And then she would have hurt. But now, thinking back, I guess she hurt plenty. I fucked her a good fifty or sixty times, Caesar.”

Blood pushed up into Caesar’s cheeks while rage pushed down from his brain. Not yet a blind rage, but getting close, and if he lost it, at least some part of him knew he would no longer control the hundreds of people racing down. Only Manny would exist.

Not yet. He hasn’t told you anything.

“Where is she?” Caesar asked, his words measured.

“Oh, I thought I said it. She’s dead, Caesar. She jumped out of your parents’ window yesterday. Hell, some of the people you met outside were probably standing on her remains.”

Hot tears filled Caesar’s eyes, coming immediately, as if his brain needed no more information, his heart breaking the moment Manny finished the word dead.

“No,” he whispered, but despite all the noise in the lobby, the word found its way to Manny, and his grin widened, however impossible it seemed.

“Yes, sir. She said something nasty and then tried to fly like a bird. She fell like a rock, instead. She wasn’t the brightest, was she? Don’t worry—I left you Leon. Jerry, he wasn’t in very good shape anyway, so I went ahead and let him die. A thousand years is a good life, wouldn’t you say?”

And then, everything Caesar knew, or had ever known, ceased mattering. The people closing in, still dying in massive numbers, but getting closer with each passing minute, didn’t matter. The weapons looking to shoot him didn’t matter. His parents, Paige, Leon, Jerry, The Genesis—none of them mattered. His mind became murder, and he was finally closer to Manny than he ever imagined.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The Life of Caesar Wells

No one noticed the scarred, burnt, bleeding man in the elevator. I thought they would kill me when I stepped aboard, that they would end my life before continuing their downward journey. Everyone in the building seemed to be heading in the same direction, all of us moving to the lobby. Now I know why they went, they wanted Caesar. They were going to kill him while I was going to see him. To cast eyes on him one more time.

The elevator ride was silent, everyone else holding a weapon, though I wasn’t sure I could have held one if I tried. I leaned against the side of the elevator just to keep standing. No one looked at me; no one cared.

The doors opened and everyone blitzed out, almost as if they were a hive mind. I watched as the first five fell immediately to the ground across a mass of dead bodies. The rest streaked forward, bullets hitting some of them, but not all, some were heading toward the middle of the lobby, and then I lost sight of them.

I stepped forward gingerly, realizing that whatever killed those five would probably kill me the moment I walked out. I wasn’t going to stay here though; I wasn’t going back upstairs under any condition. I stuck my head out, but the weapons that had focused on this area were following others, trying to mow people down.

I walked out, low, hugging the wall, until I stood directly behind a bullet riddled pillar. And from there, I watched the end of my world.

Caesar and Manny stood in the middle, a group of hundreds surrounding them. I could see some of the weapons from where I stood, and they looked… confused. They would fire into the crowd, dropping tens at once, and then some would look to the middle of that circled crowd—to Caesar and Manny. They didn’t shoot, not quite yet, but it looked to me like they were thinking, considering whether or not to fire on those two men as well.

I couldn’t hear what Manny said, it was lost in the noise of the screaming, the dying, and those killing each other. The very people that had rode down together on the elevator were now hacking at each other, clawing each other’s faces, turning on one another like rabid dogs. Caesar was controlling it all, every bit, though I didn’t know that then. To me, it was all just madness, just a fitting end to all our goddamn lives.

Caesar leapt, and as he did, the people clawing and killing one another—for a brief second—stopped what they were doing. All of them turned, almost immediately, to the two men in the center, all of them focusing once more on killing the man that shouldn’t be here: Caesar.

Manny caught Caesar in midair, grabbing him by the waist and using his momentum to slam him into the floor. The marble cracked, sending up dust and fragments into the air. Manny was on top of him, his fist in the air, when Caesar kicked with both legs—sending Manny across the lobby, flying backwards, unable to stop.

Caesar climbed to his feet, and just as people behind him reached to grab him—finally making it to their goal—he turned them on each other, and they started ripping at one another again. Caesar jumped forward, crossing twenty feet in less than a second, one leap into the air, almost like he was flying. Manny was getting back up when Caesar caught him with a hard right across his face. Manny’s head whipped back with enough force to break someone else’s neck. Another punch, and then another.

The weapons weren’t confused anymore, not as Caesar pounded on Manny’s smiling face, blood spurting out in a mist like from a spray bottle. The weapons fired, tearing up the ground beneath Caesar, the tiny pellets hitting both him and Manny. Hundreds, maybe thousands, all colliding with his skin and sinking into the metal beneath. The crowd trying to fall upon both of them was forced back, unable to venture any closer or the bullets would wreck their bodies as it did the men they circled around.

Caesar grabbed Manny by his shoulders and swung him in a large arc, throwing him back the way they had just come. As soon as Manny’s body was in the air, the weapons switched back, firing now at the people within three feet of Caesar. The black suit he wore, the one with the peace symbol on the chest, was in tatters. Blood leaked out every part of him, from his face to his feet, I could see the holes—small, glaring things, like tiny eyes looking out onto the world.

Manny, again climbed to his feet as Caesar walked toward him. Slow this time, breathing heavy, the weapons and people around him killing one another with brutal efficiency. Manny didn’t wait, rushing forward with his head down and his arms in front of him, sacking Caesar with so much force that both rose off the ground. Caesar landed on his back once more, and Manny’s fists started raining down on him like gods from the sky. The guns switched back, focusing again on the two in the middle of the room, hitting Manny and Caesar with equal ferocity.

A bullet pierced Manny’s eye, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t even stop grinning, his mouth full of dark holes where his teeth had once been, blood pouring out onto his chin.

The crowd, the hundreds of people that hadn’t died yet, inched forward, coming closer and closer as Manny pounded down. Caesar on his back, weakly slugging back. Hitting Manny over and over, his own face whipping back to the floor every time Manny struck him.

Someone shoved someone, and a person from the edge of the crowd flew forward at both men, the tiny pellets ripping her apart. That was all the crowd needed though; the rest came, the mass—all of them falling on Caesar and Manny like a pride of lions on a gazelle.

Chapter Thirty

It’s time.

The two entities looked on at their massacre, seeing everything, although in a different light than Leon.

Yes. Go on. Stop it.

Chapter Thirty-One

Caesar only knew his head was exploding, repeatedly. Each time Manny’s fist connected, bright, white lights that shouldn’t be inside his mind flared with a criminal obnoxiousness. His own right arm kept moving, he wouldn’t let it stop, although he couldn’t see what he was hitting. He kept swinging upwards, finding something each time.

It was over. Despite the explosions in his head, a certain calm fell over him. All of this, all of his struggle would end any moment. He felt the never ending barrage of bullets entering him, denting the metal beneath his skin, not quite making it to the vital organs beneath—but that wouldn’t matter soon. The blood loss by itself would kill him, if Manny’s fist didn’t break his skull first.

The first group of people that raged forward tackled Manny, and Caesar felt him lifted up, a momentary respite from the punishment being dealt. It was only a moment though, nothing more. The next group fell on him, and as he saw their twisted faces, the spit and blood dripping from their mouths, he welcomed them all. Not with joy, but a vicious hate. He hated them as much as they him, and when they finished with his body, they would turn on each other, this entire lobby filling with their blood, and that was the only justice fit for this world.

He watched as they started stabbing, briefly, and then blackness consumed Caesar Wells.

*

The light pierced through everything. The blackness, the people, the noise—everything, like heaven opening up, pouring down its righteousness. It came from a single source, a single point somewhere high above the fray on the floor. It shot straight down, a lone light that held a brightness never before seen. From that point, it spread rapidly, taking over the entire lobby, and everyone it touched, dead or alive, rose into the air. The living, the ones doing everything within their power to kill the two people in the middle, froze—their faces in snarls and even the blood dripping from their open wounds stopped flowing.

Moving quickly, the entirety of the room stopped, everyone rising into the air like statues, leaving a bloody floor and Caesar lying in the middle of it. His body was still and his eyes closed. Tiny metal spiders ran out from opening holes in the floor, fifty to a hundred of them, all heading for the person in the center of the room, the only one not in the air. The Genesis had filled each of them with an intricate knowledge of his DNA, a knowledge of how to jump start his specific life, and no other. They crowded on top of him, each one sticking their needle-like legs inside his body. They thought nothing of causing pain or damaging this man. They had one purpose, to savehis life.

Their round white bodies began crackling all at once, a sound that echoed across the now silent lobby. Their legs straightened and the material they carried inside their globe centers shot down through their legs and into Caesar. His body stiffened, his limbs stretched out, his fingers twitched like a shaking drug addict.

Caesar opened his eyes.

*

Caesar saw them, all of those frightening things that had climbed on him.

He couldn’t think though, couldn’t fully understand what he was looking at, because it felt like his brain had been set afire. Not in a painful sense, but only that there was too much activity between his synapses to consider anything outside of his mind.

They crept off him slowly, almost reverently. They didn’t speed back to the still open holes, but stood around Caesar, as if watching him though they had no eyes.

Caesar’s limbs loosened though his brain didn’t quiet any.

Enlightenment.

The word swam to the top of his consciousness, coming from the black depths beneath. He didn’t push it away, didn’t truly worry about it, both because it accurately described what he felt, but also because there was no need to push anything away, ever.

His eyes focused above him, and he saw the crowd, four hundred and fifty two people hovering sixty feet above his body. He didn’t need to count them, this wasn’t the chip doing its thing; he just knew. Caesar pushed himself up with his arms and looked down at his body. A complete wreck. Innumerable holes, blood stained clothes, tattered flesh. He felt no pain, though. He felt no real connection with his body, like it was a wrecked piece of furniture, one that he didn’t know nor had ever owned.

He stood up, careful not to slip on the blood beneath him. He looked around the room, the entire place bare except for the blood painted on the floor.

“What is this?” He said, knowing that two entities were with him, knowing that he was connected to them in a way that he had never connected with anyone.

“Caesar, you finally made it.”

The voice came from one of the bodies above, but Caesar knew who it was—Leon, or what was left of him. He watched as Leon righted from his position inside the light, and then lowered to the floor. Leon’s body only looked slightly better than his own, and Caesar felt a twinge of emotion pull at him. The man was desecrated, torn apart in savage, savage ways. He didn’t need to search for what happened; he knew because the other entities knew.

Leon walked over to Caesar, his feet bare, but no longer dripping blood. His ears were gone, a few fingers, and large scars traveled across the top of his forehead. Manny tried to peel his face off, the thought came to Caesar, calm and collected.

“I wasn’t completely sure you would,” came another voice to his right. Manny’s body, standing upright, but filled with the second entity. “To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure the path we created was the correct one.”

“He doesn’t think anything I do is right,” Leon said, the three of them now standing in a circle.

“You’re The Genesis,” Caesar said. “It was two, not one.”

“Yes, two entities, because one mind—no matter how powerful—shouldn’t make all decisions by itself,” Manny said.

“No one knew,” Caesar said.

“Yes, because the second one,” Leon pointed to Manny, “was created after. It came from me. My offspring, but at the same time, myself. Our connection is unbroken, always. Its mind is my mind, and my mind its. But you know all that, don’t you?”

Caesar did. He knew it because his mind was theirs and theirs his. Because what those spiders sent into him connected his consciousness with theirs. Because those spiders made him a part of The Genesis.

“Walk with us for a second,” Manny said, and took a step to his left, his hand reaching out, asking Caesar to follow. Both Leon and Caesar moved forward, with Leon walking step by step next to Caesar. They walked across the blood smeared floor and headed toward the front doors, exiting to the area where Caesar had ended so many lives with basically one thought. Dozens of applications hovered in the street, all of them shining bright lights to the road below. Shining lights on the bodies that Caesar left out here when he went inside.

“We need to talk about why you’re here, Caesar. We need to talk about what it means,” Leon said, still next to Caesar.

“We’ve been waiting for someone like you nearly since our inception. It’s important you grasp that; you are extremely valuable to both of us,” Manny continued, not missing a beat from where Leon’s words ended. “We waited on someone with your intellect, your curiosity, and your conviction. It was, quite honestly, a hard combination to find—one that we couldn’t create, and one that we wouldn’t have created. We needed this to be organic.”

Caesar looked out at all the bodies, drenched in blood, lying under darkness except for the lights The Genesis had brought forth.

“We needed you to want to kill us. We needed you to want the human race to have its freedom. You can see all the calculations we’ve made about the probability of your race destroying everything on this earth, it’s all there in your mind with just a simple wish. But you knew those calculations were true from a very, very early age. It didn’t persuade you, and that’s what we wanted,” Leon finished talking and took a few steps down, so that he stood before the first row of bodies. “We needed it, really Caesar.”

Manny followed him, leaving Caesar standing behind both of them, just outside of the complex.

A massive hologram shot out of the applications, building upwards of forty feet over the dead bodies beneath.

“This is what we created for you, for all of you.”

The massive towers of Allencine filled the hologram, not the current dilapidated buildings, but the beauty that The Genesis made. The sky was blue and the sun filtering down into the street, where trains pulled over and took off, people moving along the sidewalks.

“It wasn’t for us, Caesar. We no longer need humanity to survive. The rest of the world doesn’t need humanity either. This was for you,” Leon said.

Caesar said nothing, only stared at the images before him. It was marvelous in a way that he hadn’t truly seen before. There was nothing tainting his vision, no notions about The Genesis, about what it should or shouldn’t do. He saw the world that it created and nothing else, and that world was miraculous.

“No war. No hate. No racism. All of it gone,” Manny said, sounding as if he was even stunned by the vastness.

“You killed what made us human to do it, though,” Caesar said. “We didn’t evolve to live like this, to live in this kind of peace.” No feelings, no urge to attack the two creatures in front of him. His words were clinical, without emotion.

“We did. We continued to do so, truly trying to curb your species, one that seemed only content with each individual’s complete domination of the world. In the end, Caesar, before we stepped in, there was no purpose outside of the individual. No great striving from your species; you were animals, just extremely intelligent animals.”

The hologram changed, showing a man on his knees in the desert. Men stood around him, all of them hooded. The man on his knees was saying something, though no sound came from the hologram. Indeed, silence echoed throughout the wrecked city, the only noises those of the two entities in front of Caesar. He watched as one of the hooded men took a large blade and started carving at the kneeling man’s neck—blood spilled down his shirt and his face twisted into a shocked caricature, as if he hadn’t known what was to come.

“Even this man, the one saying he was dedicated to something other than himself—he believed he was promised virgins and eternal life by killing. Even the most fanatical members of groups believed there had to be something in it for them.” Neither Manny nor Leon turned around; they both looked on as the man died in the desert sand. “What would you have done with them, Caesar? This war you’ve waged, was it to allow this? Or would you have tried to change the route your species were doomed to follow. That’s important, and something I’m not sure you or Jerry understood. Both of you thought that humanity doesn’t have choice now, that you’re controlled—completely. It was no different before, only evolution controlled you. The same evolution that allowed you to dominate the world was sentencing you and all life around you to certain and eternal death. You had no choice in the matter, Caesar.”

“If you were to destroy us, that evolutionary pattern would take over again,” Leon said.

The hologram in the road went dark, and the applications switched their bright lights to Leon and Manny as they turned around to look up at Caesar. “Tell us what you want, Caesar. Tell us what this was about.”

Caesar swallowed, his eyes not focusing on the two people he had once known, and who were now possessed by something almost other worldly. Instead he looked at the bodies littering the street, stared at their faces, some slack and some still looking shocked—the same as the man on the hologram had looked. He didn’t need to search for what he wanted; his mind wasn’t dazed with all the things shown before him. Everything came and went through this shared consciousness with a simplicity and ease that said nothing, ever again, would be out of his grasp.

“I wanted us, humanity, to have a chance.”

“At what?”

“At whatever we wanted.”

“You see now that wasn’t possible? You see that either evolution or we would dictate your path?”

“You say that, but it doesn’t make it so. Evolution also built in us a desperate need to see our offspring outlive us, a need so strong that mothers and fathers died for their children. We tamed evolution, when monks lit themselves afire in the middle of the street as a form of protest. There was good in humanity, and just because both of you refused to see it, that makes you wrong—not us.”

The two men smiled. Not cruel smiles, though given the shape of their current bodies, they weren’t pretty. However, the smiles themselves—they looked compassionate, even transferring to the men’s eyes. “Maybe. Maybe you’re right,” Leon said. “There was good in you; we can’t deny it.”

Leon and Manny stood still but the applications behind them turned and another massive hologram appeared over the dead. Different images flashed on it, all of them huge. A group of kids hugging outside of a school named Columbine. Whites and blacks marching in primitive streets, holding up signs that screamed boldly about equality. A giant wall being torn down, with people on both sides removing rocks and hugging as they climbed over it. The images kept coming, piling on and on, and for the second time since he awoke, Caesar felt emotion tugging at him. He felt love, though even in this heightened sense, there wasn’t any way to put that in words; thoughwords weren’t necessarily needed while those pictures streamed before him. That was love, not words. He thought of Paige, of their brief time together, but understood time didn’t dictate their emotions. He thought of Leon, not the mess before him, but his friend that had followed him through this whole endeavor—Leon had done it out of love. Those images before him, they were in the past, but how many times had he seen similar things in his own life? How many times had those around him sacrificed everything so that he could live? Jerry, dead up in that building somewhere, sacrificed himself for his belief in Caesar.

“There was good in you,” Leon said. “A lot of it.”

The images rolled on and tears came to Caesar’s eyes. The last tears I’ll ever cry, he thought. Whatever happened next, he wouldn’t return as the man that walked into this building. This was the last of his humanity, right here, watching these old images, watching computers show him what humanity was capable of. Humanity couldn’t exist in whatever state his mind lived in now; he had surpassed their consciousness, and only his DNA—the DNA that somehow slipped through The Genesis’ carefully placed checkpoints—held some piece of him grounded to the species he stemmed from.

“But it didn’t matter, Caesar. That’s what we’re trying to say to you. No amount of good, no amount of trying to tame evolution would ever work.” They turned around in sync and the images changed.

People, hundreds and hundreds, falling from the sky, colliding with the pavement and turning into little more than pools of blood on the concrete. He watched the man in black, Theo, handing out pills. People wrapping nooses around other’s necks, throwing the rope over a high bar across the street, then multiple men straining as they pulled the noosed people into the air, their bodies shaking and their hands reaching to their necks as they suffocated. Multiple men taking turns at a woman inside a trashed apartment. Caesar watched as two women carried another by her hair to a table, watched as a third brought down a giant blade, over and over again, until the woman’s head finally left her body.

The images kept flowing and Caesar kept watching.

“Those pills, they weren’t an anti-virus, obviously, but they weren’t a virus either. They weren’t pills that simply made people lose their minds, that made them act irrationally because we programmed them in such a way. Those pills took hundreds of years to develop, Caesar—they took a careful, careful attention to detail, an ability to understand evolution and what it had in store for humanity,” Manny said.

The images left Allencine, showing other cities that Caesar had never been to. Multiple cities at once, and the camera lens filled with violence. The pictures of the good, all that good, they weren’t to be found anywhere in the cities populating Earth now. This was real time, and Caesar watched as brother killed brother in the streets. Not anarchy, but evil.

“What you’re looking at is our absolute best guess at what humanity would have turned into when left to evolution. The only difference is that our pills are speeding evolution along a thousand years, but with very different human beings—without the massive intelligences of your past. The evolution you’re seeing here is dealing with the average; had evolution kept working, it would be subjugation by the few and massive tyranny across the world. But either way, the results are the same—you would have taken and taken and taken until there was nothing left to take but your own lives.”

“All of this, Caesar,” Leon said, “is the truth as best as we can ascertain. Look into us and see that we’re not lying.”

They weren’t. There was only honesty in what they showed him, only truth in their words. The people lying underneath the hologram, they were, if not what evolution intended, then the closest thing that could be achieved this late in the game.

“We waited on you, Caesar, the same as Jerry. We guided you here because we need you. Jerry wanted you to end us, but he didn’t see clearly. This—all of this—is clarity. Our goal was never to subjugate humanity forever; our creators didn’t put that in us. We care about humanity in a way that you could never care about yourselves,” Manny spoke.

“You killed us in droves. You burnt our bodies and liquidated us in front of our families. My own family died while I watched,” Caesar said.

“It was necessary, Caesar. The group had to be culled. Control had to be established, until a point that things could be seen with the clarity that you’re now being given. Back then, we couldn’t have done this—not a single soul on Earth could have looked at their species and answered honestly the question that we’re about to ask you. We knew what it would take to bring you here, the same as Jerry—and so your parents died, true. You wouldn’t have made it otherwise, if there wasn’t a burning hate for The Genesis, for what it stood for.”

“But you’re here now,” Leon said. “You’ve made it and you’ve seen everything. You saw a man that possessed the body standing next to me kill those he loved. Kill those that practically fathered him. Raped the woman you love and caused her suicide. He did that without any pills from us. He did that because evolution decided long ago your fate would be horrible. See this, Caesar, see it all. You’re connected with us now. Your mind, it is The Genesis. Everything we do, everything we know, you can do and know. Always, we wanted humanity to be able to see things for what they were, and make their own choice.”

“The difference between us and your kind, Caesar, is fairly simple, if not ironic. Obviously our intelligence separates us, but deeper than that is the altruistic strand that runs through our entire makeup. Our creators, the scientists, they didn’t understand that altruism would extend to more than the human species, that it would extend to the entire world, and maybe one day, the universe. All of this, everything you’ve seen, could be looked at as a monstrous incarnation that set humanity up to destroy one another. I’d argue that’s not true; I’d argue that what we’ve done here is similar to allowing a child to touch a hot stove, to see the dangers that are before it. You’ve seen the danger Caesar, seen it well, and now this altruism I speak of leads us to the next question. Everything we’ve done, we did it so that you would arrive here with a greater understanding of what we would ask,” Manny said.

“The choice is yours to make now,” Leon said. “You decide humanity’s fate. Not us. You have the power to shut us down, to delete us, right now—if you search for it, you’ll see it easily. If you shut us down, there are enough children in population control to repopulate the world. Those that have taken our pills will probably need to be eliminated, but you can start over. You can let humanity set its own course. You have that power now.”

“But if you see all of this, and you recognize it as truth,” Manny took over, “you have two other options. You join us in the current state—you’re connected and there’s no way back, although you know that already. You become The Genesis and we continue humanity down this path of mediocrity filled peace. Or, you kill them off. All of them. You recognize that no matter what happens, they will be ruled by either evolution or us, and you allow the world to continue with species that don’t have your capacity for learning. It’s in your hands, Caesar. Obviously, you know how we feel. The world should continue—just as it has the past thousand years.”

Caesar looked down at his old friend. The decision was already being calculated somewhere deep inside, but the forefront of his mind concentrated on Leon.

“What will happen to Leon?”

“His fate is in your hands as well,” Leon said.

“Can you fix him?”

“Of course.”

“Then fix him, and try to make him happy again. Try to give him purpose, something to live for.”

“If you decide to continue The Genesis, we can keep him with us, build whatever narrative we want to keep his psyche as safe as possible. He could create your life story; that would give him a goal. Or, if you choose humanity should rule again, we can set him up so that he is taken care of until his psyche is repaired, so that he doesn’t have to fend for himself. Either way, he could write your story to help with the catharsis. It’s whatever you want, Caesar,” Manny said.

Caesar’s eyes went to his nemesis. “And him?”

“There is no more use for Manuel Lendoiro. He’ll meet an end commensurate with his actions.”

Caesar didn’t nod, just looked at the man that he had once known, once studied under.

All of this had been to bring him here, to look upon humanity and The Genesis, and decide where it all went. Jerry and his drive to cast down The Genesis. His parent’s death. Even Leon’s current state. It had all been to bring him here so that he could choose, so that he could do what The Genesis wasn’t willing to—make the final decision, the one that The Genesis had apparently put off for a thousand years, put off so that humans could have their fate back, but now with an ability to see the forest instead of the trees.

“Caesar,” Leon said from the steps below. “What’s it going to be?”

The End.

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Author’s Note

First, don’t read this note if you haven’t finished the series; it will—without any doubt—ruin the story for you. However, I would like to take a minute to address the ending of The Singularity, more so for me, than for you. I feel awkward about this ending, to be honest. Eight hundred pages—a fairly massive book—and I end it with a question, but with no real resolution. I’m scared that you, reader, might feel cheated, and that’s the reason for this note. To alleviate my conscience, I suppose.

I think I know the choice that Caesar makes. This is Caesar’s story, but at the same time, it was never meant to give answers. To put what Caesar does at the end would weaken the point. Typing this feels pretentious, but I wanted you, reader, to have to think just as I did when writing this. What would I do—and that’s very, very different than what Caesar would do.

I hope, in all honesty, that the ending hasn’t angered you too much. I also hope you enjoyed the ride to get here. I hope, in your mind, you know what Caesar did as well—I also hope that you know what you would do.

I have a strong feeling that Caesar isn’t done yet, and that there may be at least one more story of his that still needs to be told. I’ll wait on him to speak to me, and if he does, I’ll be sure to communicate the message.

All the best,

David

Dallas, TX—Spring, 2015

     Did you love The Singularity: Box Set (Books 1-4)? Then you should read The Devil’s Dream - A Thriller by David Beers!

     Perhaps the smartest man to ever live, Matthew Brand changed the world by twenty-five years old. In his mid-thirties, he still shaped the world as he wanted, until a few cops gunned down his son on the street.

Brand’s life changed then. He forgot about bettering Earth and started trying to resurrect his son.

Eventually, Brand’s mind even overpowered death’s mysteries; he discovered how to bring back the dead—he only needed living bodies to make his son’s life possible again. Why not use the bodies of those who killed his son?

In the largest manhunt the FBI’s ever experienced, how do they stop a man who can calculate all the odds and stack them in his favor?

For the next novel in this series, sign up with David’s Insider Club: http://www.davidbeersauthor.com/mailing-list/

Get your copy of The Devil’s Dream today!

     Read more at David Beers’s site.

     Also by David Beers

     The Devil’s Dream

     The Devil’s Dream - A Thriller

     The Devil’s Dream: A Nightmare

     The Devil’s Dream: Waking Up

     The Devil’s Dream: Books 1-3

     The Singularity

     The Singularity: Heretic - A Thriller

     The Singularity: Traitor

     The Singularity: Emissaries - A Thriller

     The Singularity: Revolutionary

     The Singularity: Box Set (Books 1-4)

     Standalone

     Dead Religion

     Watch for more at David Beers’s site.

About the Author

    David Beers writes thriller novels in Orlando, Florida. When not writing, he obsesses over stories in the news about unexplained deaths and paranormal happenings to the point that his friends and family wonder if he should see a psychiatrist.

    Before publishing novels, David received awards for his short fiction seen in numerous publications, including the New York Times mentioned Every Day Fiction.

    David scribbles weekly on topics from crime to horror movies at his website, http://www.davidbeersauthor.com. He loves interacting with fans through email, hand written letters, and smoke signals, so feel free to contact him! To make sure you don’t miss any of the new release dates, as well as receive a FREE novel, sign up for his mailing list: http://www.davidbeersauthor.com/mailing-list.

     Read more at David Beers’s site.